Accepting the universe : essays in naturalism

ACCEPTING
THE UNIVERSE

BY
JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Che Vivergide press Cambridge
1920

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eae And heard great argument
About tt and about : but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went.

THE RUBAIYAT

PREFACE

WHEEL may have many spokes, but can
have but one hub. So I may say of this vol-
ume of mine that there are many themes and
chapter-headings, but there is but one central
thought into which they all converge, and that is
that the universe is good, and that it is our rare
good fortune to form a part of it. As this collection
of essays does not aim to be a systematic treatise on
any one theme, but rather a series of sallies, excur-
sions, into the world of semi-philosophical specula-
tion, there is inevitably much repetition; there may
even be some contradiction. But I have concluded
to let them stand, as I find myself an interested
spectator of the workings of my own mind when, in
following different roads, it arrives at the same
truth. As all roads lead to Rome, so in the realm in
which my mind works in this volume, all roads lead
to the conclusion that this is the best possible world,
and these people in it are the best possible people.
The heart of Nature is sound. I feel toward the
great Mother somewhat as a man does who takes
out a policy in an insurance company: he believes
the company is solvent and will meet its obligations,
I look upon the universe as solvent and worthy of

vii

_ PREFACE

trust. In other words this is a book of radical opti-
mism. It might be described as an attempt to jus-
tify the ways of God to man on natural grounds.

My reader need hardly be told that theological
grounds do not count with me. I want nothing less
than a faith founded upon a rock, faith in the con-
stitution of things. The various man-made creeds
are fictitious, like the constellations — Orion, Cas-
siopeia’s Chair, the Big Dipper; the only thing real
in them is the stars, and the only thing real in the
creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the Infinite.
This abides, though creeds and dogmas change or
vanish.

Empedocles says:

“O, wretched he whose care
Is shadowy speculation on the gods.”
But is not speculation better than indifference?
Curiosity about the gods may lead to a better
acquaintance with them. I feel that each of these
chapters might be called an altar to the Unknown
God.
JOHN BURROUGHS

CONTENTS

I. SHaun we Accept THE UNIVERSE?
II. Manrrotp NAatuRE
III. Eacu ror its Own Sake
IV. Tue Untversat BENEFICENCE
V. Tae Goop DEvILs
VI. Tue Naturat PRovipENCE
VII. Tue Farru or a NATURALIST
VIII. A Fanuacy MADE IN GERMANY
IX. Tae Prick or DEVELOPMENT
X. TootTH AND CLAw
XI. MEn anp TREES
XII. Tur Prosiem or Evin
XIII. Horizon Linzs:
I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS
Ill. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY
IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM
V. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE?
VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER
VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS
VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS
IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE
X. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE
1x

19
30
54
73
90
112
134
138
158
173
193

203
205
207
Q11
219
225
226
230
233
237

CONTENTS

XIII. Horizon Lives (continued):

XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE 288
XII. ILLUSIONS 239
XIII, IS NATURE SUICIDAL? 242
XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY 245

XIV. Sounpines:

I. THE GREAT MYSTERY 253

Il. THE NATURAL ORDER Q57
III. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 261
IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK 265
Vv. A PERSONAL GOD 266
VI. THE ETERNAL 270
VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY Q75
VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE 278
IX. THE INSOLUBLE 280
X. PAYING THE DEBT 2892
XI. DEATH : 288
XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH 293
XIII. THINKING AND ACTING 296
XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE 304
XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK 309
XV. Tue Port or tHE Cosmos 316

The frontispiece, showing Mr. Burroughs at
his woodpile at Riverby, is from a photograph
taken in 1920 by Mr. Hersert S. ARDELL

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

I
SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

I

T is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said

.. she accepted the universe. “Gad, she’d better!”
retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept
the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Look-
ing up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: ‘‘A sad
spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for
misery and folly; if they be na inhabited, what a
waste of space!”

It ought not to be a hard thing to accept the
universe, since it appears to be a fixture, and we
have no choice in the matter; but I have found it
worth while to look the gift in the mouth, and con-
vince myself that it is really worth accepting. It
were a pity to go through life with a suspicion in
one’s mind that it might have been a better uni-
verse, and that some wrong has been done us be-
cause we have no freedom of choice in the matter.
The thought would add a tinge of bitterness to all
our days. And so, after living more than four score
years in the world, and pondering long and. intently
upon the many problems which life and nature
present, I have come, like Margaret Fuller, to

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

accept the universe, have come frankly to ac-
cept that first verdict pronounced upon creation,
namely, that it is very good — good in its sum
total up to this astronomic date, whatever phases
it may at times present that lead us to a contrary
conclusion.

Not that cold and hunger, war and pestilence,
tornadoes and earthquakes, are good in a positive
sense, but that these and kindred things are vastly
overbalanced by the forces and agencies that
make for our well-being, — that “work together for
good,’’ — the sunshine, the cooling breezes, the
fertile soil, the stability of land and sea, the gentle
currents, the equipoise of the forces of the earth, air,
and water, the order and security of our solar sys-
tem, and, in the human realm, the good-will and
fellowship that are finally bound to prevail among
men and nations.

In remote geologic ages, before the advent of
man, when the earth’s crust was less stable, when
the air was yet loaded with poisonous gases, when
terrible and monstrous animal forms held high
carnival in the sea and upon the land, it was not in
_ the same sense good — good for beings constructed
as we are now. In future astronomic time, when the
earth’s air and water and warmth shall have dis- ©
appeared — a time which science predicts — and
all life upon the globe fails, again it will not be good.
But in our geologic, biologic, and astronomic age,

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SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

notwithstanding the fact that cold and suffering,
war and pestilence, cyclones and earthquakes, still
occur upon the relatively tiny ball that carries us
through the vast sidereal spaces, good is greatly
in the ascendancy. The voyage is not all calm and
sunshine, but it is safe, and the dangers from colli-
sion and shipwreck are very remote. It is a vast and
lonely sea over which we are journeying, no other
ships hail us and bid us Godspeed, no messages,
wireless or other, may reach us from other shores,
or other seas; forces and influences do play upon us
from all parts of the empyrean, but, so far as we are
aware, no living thing on other spheres takes note
of our going or our coming.

In our practical lives we are compelled to sepa-
rate good from evil — the one being that which
favors our well-being, and the other that which an-
tagonizes it; but, viewed as a whole, the universe
is all good; it is an infinite complex of compensations
out of which worlds and systems of worlds, and all
which they hold, have emerged, and are emerging,
and will emerge. This is not the language of the
heart or of the emotions — our anthropomorphism
cries out against it — but it is the language of
serene, impartial reason. It is good for us occasion-
ally to get outside the sphere of our personal life
and view things as they are in and of themselves. A
great demand is made upon our faith — faith in the
absolute trustworthiness of human reason, and in

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‘ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE .

the final beneficence of the forces that rule this
universe. Not to solve the mysteries, but to see that
they are insoluble, and to rest content in that con-
clusion, is the task we set ourselves here. |

Evidently the tide of life is still at the flood on
this planet; its checks and counter-currents arise in-
evitably in a universe whose forces are always, and
always must be, in unstable equilibrium.

The love of the Eternal for mankind, and for all
other forms of life, is not a parental love — not the
love of the mother for her child, or of the father for
his son; it is more like the love which a general has
for his army; he is to lead that army through hard-
ships, through struggles, through sufferings, and
through death, but he is leading it to victory. Many
will perish that others may live; the battle is being
won daily. Evolution has triumphed. It has been a
long and desperate battle, but here we are and we
find life sweet. The antagonistic forces which have
been overcome have become sources of power. The
vast army of living forms moving down the geologic
ages has been made strong through the trials and
obstacles it has surmounted, till now we behold it in
the fullness of its power with man at its head.

II
THERE is a paragraph in Emerson’s Journal on
Providence, written when he was twenty-one, which
is as broad and as wise and as heterodox as any-
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SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

thing he ever wrote. The Providence he depicts is
the Providence I see in Nature:

“Providence supports, but does not spoil its
children. We are called sons, not darlings, of the
Deity. There is ever good in store for those who
love it; knowledge for those who seek it; and if we
do evil, we suffer the consequences of evil. Through-
out the administration of the world there is the
same aspect of stern kindness; of good against your
will; good against your good; ten thousand channels
of active beneficence, but all flowing with the same
regard to general, not particular profit. ... And
to such an extent is this great statute policy of God
carried, that many, nay, most, of the great bless-
ings of humanity require cycles of a thousand years
to bring them to their height.”

A remarkable statement to be made in 1824, in
New England, and by a fledgling preacher of the
orthodox faith and the descendant of a long line of
orthodox clergymen. It is as broad and as impartial
as science, and yet makes a strong imaginative ap-
peal. Good at the heart of Nature is the purport of
it, not the patent-right good of the creeds, but good,
free to all who love it, a “‘stern kindness,” and no
partial, personal, vacillating Providence whose ear
is open only to the password of some sect or cult,
or organization — “good against your good,” your
copyrighted good, your personal, selfish good (unless
it is in line with equal good to others), the broad,

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

universal beneficence of Nature which brought us
here and keeps us here, and showers its good upon
us as long as we keep in right relations with it; but
which goes its appointed way regardless of the sore
needs of warring nations or the desperate straits of
struggling men. That is the Providence that lasts,
that does not change its mind, that is not indulgent,
that does not take sides, that is without variable-
ness or shadow of turning. Suppose the law of
gravity were changeable, or the law of chemical re-
actions, or the nature of fire, or air, or water, or
cohesion? Gravity never sleeps nor varies, yet see
bodies rise, see others fall, see the strong master of
the weak, see the waters flow and the ground stay.
The laws of fluids are fixed, but see the variety of
their behavior, the forms in which they crystallize,
their solvent power, their stability or instability,
their capacity to absorb or conduct heat — flux
and change everywhere amid fixity and law. Nature
is infinitely variable, which opens the door to all
forms of life; her goings and comings are on such a
large scale, like the rains, the dews, the sunlight, that
all creatures get an equal benefit. She sows her seed
with such a generous hand that enough of them
are bound to fall upon fertile places. Such as are
very limited in range, like those of the swamp plants,
are yet cast forth upon the wind so liberally that
sooner or later some of them fall upon conditions
suitable to them. Nature will cover a whole town-
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SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

ship with her wind-sown seeds in order to be
sure that she hits the small swamp in one corner
of it.

A stream of energy, not described by the ad-
jective “inexhaustible,” bears the universe along,
and all forms of life, man with the rest, take their
chances amid its currents and its maelstroms. The
good Providence shows itself in the power of adap-
tation which all forms of life possess. Some forms of
sea-weed or sea-grass grow where the waves pound
the shore incessantly. How many frail marine crea-
tures are wrecked upon the shore, but how many
more are not wrecked! How many ships go down
in the sea, but how many more are wafted safely
over it! :

The Providence in Nature seems intent only on
playing the game, irrespective of the stakes, which to
us seem so important. Whatever the issue, Nature
is the winner. She cannot lose. Her beneficence is
wholesale. Her myriad forms of life are constantly
passing through “the curtain of fire” of her inor-
ganic forces, and the casualties are great, but the
majority get through. The assault goes on and will
ever go on. It is like a stream of water that is whole
and individual at every point, but fixed and stable
at no point. To play the game, to keep the currents
going — from the depths of sidereal space to the
shallow pool by the roadside; from the rise and fall
of nations, to the brief hour of the minute summer

9

ACCEPTING. THE UNIVERSE

insects, the one overarching purpose seems to be to
give free rein to life, to play one form against an-
other, to build up and tear down, to gather to-
gether and to scatter — no rest, no end, nothing
final — rocks decaying to build more rocks, worlds
destroyed to build more worlds, nations disintegrat-
ing to build more nations, organisms perishing to
feed more organisms, life playing into the hands of
death everywhere, and death playing into the hands
of life, sea and land interchanging, tropic and arctic
meeting and mingling, day and night, winter and
summer chasing each other over the earth — what
a spectacle of change, what a drama never com-
pleted! Vast worlds and systems in fiery flux; one
little corner of the cosmos teeming with life, vast
areas of it, like Saturn and Jupiter, dead and barren
through untold millions of years; collisions and dis-
ruptions in the heavens, tornadoes and earthquakes
and wars and pestilence upon the earth — surely
it all sounds worse than it is, for we are all here to
see and contemplate the great spectacle; it sounds
worse than it is to us because we are a part of the
outcome of all these raging and conflicting forces.
Whatever has failed, we have succeeded, and the
beneficent forces are still coming our way. As I
write these lines I see my neighbor and his boys
gathering the hay from the meadows and _ building
it into a great stack beside their glutted barns. I
see a chipmunk carrying stores to his den, I see
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SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

butterflies dancing by on painted wings, I see and
hear the happy birds, and the August sun beams
his best upon all the land.

The greatest of human achievements and the
most precious is that of the great creative artist.
In words, in color, in sounds, in forms, man comes
nearest to emulating the Creative Energy itself.
It seems as if the pleasure and the purpose of
the Creative Energy were endless invention — to
strike out new forms, to vary perpetually the pat-
tern. She presents myriads of forms, myriads of
types, inexhaustible variety in air, earth, water, ten
thousand ways to achieve the same end, a prodi-
gality of means that bewilders the mind; her aim
to produce something new and different, an endless
variety of forms that fly, that swim, that creep, in
the sea, in the air, on the earth, in the fields, in the
woods, on the shore. How many ways Nature has of
scattering her seeds, how many types of wings, of
hooks, of springs! In some she offers a wage to bird
or quadruped in the shape of fruit, others she forci-
bly attaches to the passer-by. In all times and
places there is a riot of invention.

Ill

ARE we not men enough to face things as they are?

Must we be cosseted a little? Can we not be weaned

from the old theological pap? Can we not rest con-

tent in the general beneficence of Nature’s Provi-
1]

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

dence? Must you and I have a special hold upon the
great Mother’s apron strings?

I see the Nature Providence going its impartial
way. I see drought and flood, heat and cold, war
and pestilence, defeat and death, besetting man at
all times, in all lands. I see hostile germs in the air
he breathes, in the water he drinks, in the soil he
tills. I see the elemental forces as indifferent to-
ward him as toward ants and fleas. I see pain and
disease and defeat and failure dogging his footsteps.
I see the righteous defeated and the ungodly tri-
umphant — this and much more I see; and yet I
behold through the immense biological vista be-
hind us the race of man slowly — oh, so slowly! —
emerging from its brute or semi-human ancestry
into the full estate of man, from blind instinct and
savage passion into the light of reason and moral
consciousness. I behold the great scheme of evolu-
tion unfolding despite all the delays and waste and
failures, and the higher forms appearing upon the
scene. I see on an immense scale, and as clearly as in
a demonstration in a laboratory, that good comes
out of evil; that the impartiality of the Nature Prov-
idence is best; that we are made strong by what we
overcome; that man is man because he is as free to
do evil as to do good; that life is as free to develop
hostile forms as to develop friendly; that power
waits upon him who earns it; that disease, wars.
the unloosened, devastating elemental forces, have

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SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

each and all played their part in developing and
hardening man and giving him the heroic fiber. The
good would have no tang, no edge, no cutting
quality without evil to oppose it. Life would be
tasteless or insipid, without pain and struggle and
disappointment. Behold what the fiery furnace
does for the metals — welding or blending or sep-
arating or purifying them, and behold the hell of
contending and destructive forces out of which the
earth came, and again behold the grinding and
eroding forces, the storms and earthquakes and
eruptions and disintegrations that have made it
the green inhabitable world that now sustains us!
No, the universal processes do not need disinfect-
ing; the laws of the winds, the rains, the sunlight do
not need rectifying. “I do not want the constella-
tions any nearer,” says Whitman. I do not want the
natural Providence any more attentive. The celes-
tial laws are here underfoot and our treading upon
them does not obliterate or vulgarize them. Chemis-
try is incorruptible and immortal, it is the hand-
maid of God; the yeast works in the elements of our
bread of life while we sleep; the stars send their in-
fluences, the earth renews itself, the brooding heaven
gathers us under its wings, and all is well with us if
we have the heroic hearts to see it.

In the curve of the moon’s or of the planets’
disks, all broken or irregular lines of the surface are
lost to the eye — the wholeness of the sphere form

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

subordinates and obliterates them all: so all the
failures and cross-purposes and disharmonies in
nature and life do not suffice to break or mar the
‘vast general beneficence; the flowing universal good
is obvious above all.

So long as we think of the Eternal in terms of our
experience — of the knowledge of concrete things
and beings which life discloses to us — we are in-
volved in contradictions. The ancients visualized
their gods and goddesses — Jove, Apollo, Minerva,
Juno, and all the others. Shall we do this for the
Eternal and endow it with personality? Into what
absurdities this leads us! The unspeakable, the un-
seeable, the unthinkable, the inscrutable, and yet
the most obvious fact that life yields to us! Nearer
and more vital than our own bodies, than our own
parents, and yet eluding our grasp; vehemently
denied, passionately accepted, scoffed, praised,
feared, worshiped, giving rise to deism, atheism,
pantheism, to idolatry, to persecution, to martyr-
dom, the great Reality in which we live and move
and have our being, and yet for that very reason,
because it is a part of us, or rather we are a part of
it, are we unable to define it or seize it as a reality
apart from ourselves. Our denial proves it; just as
we use gravity to overcome gravity, so we use God
to deny God. Just as pure light is of no color, but
split up makes all the colors that we see, so God
divided and reflected makes all the half-gods we

14

SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

worship in life. Green and blue and red and orange
are not in the objects that reflect them, but are an
experience of the eye. We might with our tongues
deny the air, but our spoken words prove it. We
cannot .lift ourselves over the fence by our own
waistbands; no more can we by searching find God,
because He is not an object that has place and form
and limitations. He is the fact of the fact, the life
of the life, the soul of the soul, the incomprehensi-
ble, the sum of all contradictions, the unit of all
diversity; he who knows Him, knows Him not; he
who is without Him, is full of Him; turn your back
upon Him, then turn your back upon gravity, upon
air, upon light. He cannot be seen, but by Him all
seeing comes. He cannot be heard, yet by Him all
hearing comes. He is not a being, yet apart from
Him there is no being —there is no apart from
Him. We contradict ourselves when we deny Him;
it is ourselves we deny, and equally do we con-
tradict ourselves when we accept Him; it is some-
thing apart from ourselves which we accept.

When half-gods go, says Emerson, the gods ar-
rive. But half-gods never go; we can house and en-
tertain no other. What can we do with the Infinite,
the Eternal? We can only deal with things in time
and space — things that can be numbered and
measured. What can we do with the infinitely little,
the infinitely great? All our gods are half-gods made
in our own image. No surer does the wax take the

15

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

imprint of the seal than does the Infinite take the
imprint of our finite minds. We create a Creator, we
rule a Ruler, we invent a heaven and hell; they are
laws of our own being, seen externally.

How, then, shall we adjust our lives to the con-
ception of a universal, non-human, non-finite, al-
gebraic God? They adjust themselves. Do your
work, deal justly, love rightness, make the most of
yourself, cherish the good, the beautiful, the true,
practice the Christian and the heathen virtues of
soberness, meekness, reverence, charity, unselfish-
ness, justice, mercy, singleness of purpose; obey the
commandments, the Golden Rule, imbue your
spirit with the wisdom of all ages, for thus is the
moral order of the world upheld.

The moral order and the intellectual order go
hand in hand. Upon one rests our relation to our
fellows, upon the other rests our relation to the
cosmos.

We must know, and we must love; we must do,
and we must enjoy; we must warm judgment with
feeling, and illume conscience with reason.

Admit, if we must, that we are in the grip of a
merciless power, that outside of our own kind there
is nothing that shows us mercy or consideration,
that the Nature of which we form a part goes her
own way regardless of us; yet let us keep in mind
that the very fact that we are here and find life
good is proof that the mercilessness of Nature has

16

SHALL WE ACCEPT THE UNIVERSE?

not been inconsistent with our permanent well-
being. The fact that flowers bloom and fruit and
grains ripen, that the sun shines, that the rain falls,
that food nourishes us, that love warms us, that
evolution has brought us thus far on our way, that
our line of descent has survived all the hazards of
the geologic ages, all point to the fact that we are on
the winning side, that our well-being is secured in
the constitution of things. For all the cataclysms
and disruptions, the globe has ripened on the great
sidereal tree, and has become the fit abode of its
myriad forms of life. Though we may be run down
and crushed by the great terrestrial forces about us,
just as we may be run down and crushed in the
street, yet these forces play a part in the activities
that sustain us; without them we should not be
here to suffer at their hands.

Our life depends from moment to moment upon
the air we breathe, yet its winds and tempests may
destroy us; it depends from day to day upon the
water we drink, yet its floods may sweep us away.
We walk and climb and work and move mountains
by gravity, and yet gravity may break every bone
in our bodies. We spread our sails to the winds and
they become our faithful servitors, yet the winds
may drive us into the jaws of the breakers. How
are our lives bound up and identified with the mer-
ciless forces that surround us! Out of the heart of
fate comes our freedom; out of the reign of death

17

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

comes our life; out of the sea of impersonal energy
come our personalities; out of the rocks comes the
soil that sustains us; out of the fiery nebulz came
the earth with its apple-blossoms and its murmur-
ing streams; out of the earth came man. If the cos-
mic forces were not merciless, if they did not go
their own way, if they made exceptions for you and
me, if in them there were variableness and even a
shadow of turning, the vast inevitable beneficence
of Nature would vanish, and the caprice and uncer-
tainty of man take its place. If the sun were to stand
still for Joshua to conquer his enemies, there would
be no further need for it to resume its journey.
What I am trying to get rid of is the pitying and
meddling Providence which our feeble faith and
half-knowledge have enthroned above us. We need
stronger meat than the old theology affords us. We
need to contemplate the ways of a Providence that
has not been subsidized; we need encouragement in
our attitude of heroic courage and faith toward an
impersonal universe; we need to have our petty an-
thropomorphic views of things shaken up and hung
out in the wind to air. The universe is not a school-
room on the Montessori lines, nor a benevolent in-
stitution run on the most modern improved plan. It
is a work-a-day field where we learn from hard
knocks, and where the harvest, not too sure, waits
upon our own right arm.

~

II
MANIFOLD NATURE

EW persons, I fancy, ever spend much time in

thinking seriously of this vast, ever-present
reality which we call Nature; what our true relations
to it are, what its relations are to what we call God,
or what God’s relations are to it; whether God and
Nature are two or one— God and Nature, or only
Nature, or only God.

When we identify Nature with God we are at once
in sore straits because Nature has a terrible side to
her, but the moment we separate God from Nature
we are still more embarrassed. We create a hiatus
which we must find something to fill. We must in-
vent a Devil upon whom to saddle the evil that
everywhere dogs the footsteps of the good. So we
have both a God and a Devil, or two gods, on our
hands contending with each other. Even our good
friends in the churches talk glibly of the God of Na-
ture, or Nature’s God, little heeding the terrible
black depths that lie under their words.

The Nature that the poets sing and that nature-
writers exploit is far from being the whole story.
When we think of Nature as meaning only birds
and flowers and summer breezes and murmuring
streams, we have only touched the hem of her gar-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

ment — a garment that clothes the whole world
with the terrific and the destructive, as well as with
the beautiful and the beneficent. Yet her fairer
forms and gentler influences are undoubtedly the
expression of those forces and conditions that go
hand in hand with the things that make for our de-
velopment and well-being.

Probably not till flowers bloomed and birds sang
was the earth ripe for man. Not till the bow ap-
peared on the retreating storm-cloud was anything
like human life possible. Of savage, elemental Na-
ture, black in tempest and earthquake, hideous in
war and pestilence, our poets and nature-students
make little, while devout souls seem to experience a
cosmic chill when they think of these things.

The majority of persons, I fancy, when they con-
sider seriously the problem, look upon Nature as
a sort of connecting link between man and some
higher power, neither wholly good nor wholly bad;
divine in some aspects, diabolical in others; minis- .
tering to our bodies, but hampering and obstructing
our souls. They see her a goddess one hour, and a
fury the next; destroying life as freely as she gives
it; arming one form to devour another; crushing or
destroying the fairest as soon as the ugliest; limited
in her scope and powers, and not complete in her-
self, but demanding the existence of something
above and beyond herself.

Under the influence of Christianity man has

20

MANIFOLD NATURE

taken himself out of the category of natural things,
both in his origin and in his destiny. Such a gulf
separates him from all other creatures, and his mas-
tery over them is so complete that he looks upon
himself as exceptional, and as belonging to another
order. Nature is only his stepmother, and treats
him with the harshness and indifference that often
characterize that relation.

When Wordsworth declared himself a worshiper
of Nature, was he thinking of Nature as a whole, or
only of an abridged and expurgated Nature — Na-
ture in her milder and more beneficent aspects? Was
it not the Westmoreland Nature of which he was
a worshiper? — a sweet rural Nature, with grassy
fells and murmuring streams and bird-haunted soli-
tudes? What would have been his emotion in the
desert, in the arctic snows, or in the pestilential for-
ests and jungles of the tropics? Very likely, just
what the emotion of most of us would be — a feeling
that here are the savage and forbidding and hostile
aspects of Nature against which we need to be on
our guard. That creative eye and ear to which
Wordsworth refers is what mainly distinguishes the
attitude of the modern poet toward Nature from
the ancient. Sympathy is always creative —
“thanks to the human heart by which we live.”

The Wordsworthian Nature was of the subjective
order; he found it in his own heart, in his dreams by
his own fireside, in moments of soul dilation on his

21

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Westmoreland hills, when the meanest flowers that
blow could bring to him “thoughts that do often lie
too deep for tears.”

The Nature that to Wordsworth never betrays
us, and to Milton was “wise and frugal,” is a hu-
manized, man-made Nature. The Nature we know
and wrest our living from, and try to drive sharp
bargains with, is of quite a different order. It is no
more constant than inconstant, no more wise and
frugal than foolish and dissipated; it is not human
at all, but unhuman.

When we infuse into it our own idealism, or re-
create it in our own image, then we have the Nature
of the poets, the Nature that consciously minis-
ters to us and makes the world beautiful for our
sake.

When in his first book, “‘ Nature,’ Emerson says
that the aspect of Nature is devout, like the figure
of Jesus when he stands with bended head and
hands folded upon the breast, we see what a sub-
jective and humanized Nature, a Nature of his own
creation, he is considering. His book is not an inter-
pretation of Nature, but an interpretation of his
own soul. It is not Nature which stands in an atti-
tude of devotion with bowed head, but Emerson’s
own spirit in the presence of Nature, or of what he
reads into Nature. Yet the Emerson soul is a part of
Nature — a peculiar manifestation of its qualities
and possibilities, developed through centuries of

22

MANIFOLD NATURE

the interaction of man upon man, through culture,
books, religion, meditation.

“The ruin or the blank that we see when we look
at Nature,” he says, “‘is in our own eye.” Is it not
equally true that the harmony and perfection that
_we see are in our own eye also? In fact, are not all
the qualities and attributes which we ascribe to Na-
ture equally the creation of our own minds? The
beauty, the sublimity, the power of Nature are ex-.
periences of the beholder. The drudge in the fields
does not experience them, but the poet, the thinker,
the seer, does. Nature becomes very real to us when
we come to deal with her practically, when we seek
her for specific ends, when we go to her to get our
living. But when we go to her in the spirit of disin-
terested science, the desert, the volcano, the path
of the cyclone, are full of the same old meanings,
the playground of the same old elements and forces.
Nature is what we make her. In his Journal Emer-
son for a moment sees Nature as she is: “ Nature is
a Swamp, on whose purlieus we see prismatic dew-
drops, but her interiors are terrific.”

Man is the only creature that turns upon Nature
and judges her; he turns upon his own body and,
mind and judges them; he judges the work of his
own hands; he is critical toward all things that sur-
round him; he brings this faculty of judgment into
the world.

Emerson refers to “‘the great Nature in which we

23

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmos-
phere.” The earth lies in the soft arms of the at-
mosphere in the same sense that it lies in the soft
arms of its own grasses and flowers; the atmosphere
is an appendage of the earth. If the earth literally
lies in anything, it is in the soft arms of the all-per-
vasive ether. Emerson’s statement is the inevitable
poetizing of Nature in which we all indulge. We
make soft arms for our thoughts to lie in, and peace-
ful paths for our feet to walk in, whatever the literal
truth may be. This is the way of art, of poetry, of
religion. The way of science and of practical life is a
different way. The soft arms become hard with pur-
pose, and rest and contemplation give place to in-
tense activity. I would not have the poet change his
way; Nature as reflected in his mind soothes and
charms us; it takes on hues from that light which
never was on sea or land. But we cannot dispense
with the way of science, which makes paths and
highways for us through the wilderness of imper-
sonal laws and forces that surge and roar around us.
One gives us beauty and one gives us power; one
brings a weapon to the hand, the other brings solace
to the spirit.

When Bryant identifies God with tempests and
thunderbolts, with “whirlwinds that uproot the
woods and drown the villages,” or with the tidal
wave that overwhelms the cities, “with the wrath
of the mad, unchained elements” — “‘ tremendous

24

MANIFOLD NATURE

tokens of thy power” — does he make God more
lovable or desirable? Well may he say, “‘From these
sterner aspects of thy face, spare me and mine.”
By way of contrast let me recall that when an earth-
quake shook California, John Muir cheered himself
and friends by saying it was only Mother Earth
trotting her children fondly upon her knee! If we
identify God with all of Nature, this wrathful He-
brew Jehovah of Bryant ’is a legitimate conception.
There are times when the aerial forces behave like
a raving maniac sbent ‘upon the destruction of the
world — thé insensate powers run amuck upon all
living things. This i is not the Gad we habitually love
and worship, bat it is a God from whom there is no
escape. As the result of the inevitable action of the
natural irrational or unrational forces, tempests and
earthquakes and tidal waves do not disturb us; but
as the will and purpose of an Almighty Being, Crea-
tor of heaven and earth, they give all pious souls a
fearful shake-up. We take refuge in such phrases as
“the inscrutable ways of God,” or “the mysteries
of Providence,” a Providence whose ways are as-
suredly “past finding out.”

Our State Commissioner of Education, Dr. Fin-
Jey, in an agricultural address on “Potatoes and
Boys,” showed God codperating with the farmer in
a way that amused me. “The Almighty,” the Com-
missioner said, “can make, unaided of man, pota-
toes, but only small potatoes, and of acrid taste. He

25

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE '

had to make a primitive man and even teach him to
use a hoe, before He, the Omnipotent One, could
grow a patch of potatoes.” The wild potato, he im-
plied, like the wild grape, the wild apple, the wild
melon, was the work of God before he had man to
help him; now, with man’s help, we have all the im-
proved varieties of potatoes and fruits. We have
heard a good deal about the codperation of man
with God, and as a concrete example this potato-
growing partnership is very interesting. How far
from our habitual attitude of mind is the thought
that the Higher Powers concern themselves about
our potatoes or our turnips or our pumpkin crop, or
have any part or lot in it! Emerson in his Journal
expresses another view: “‘One would think that God
made fig-trees and dates, grapes and olives, but the
Devil made Baldwin apples and pound pears, cher-
ries and whortle berries, Indian corn and Irish pota-
toes.”

Sir Thomas Browne called Nature the art of God.
Viewed in this light we get a new conception of Na-
ture, the artistic conception. We do not ask: Is it
good or bad, for us or against us? we are intent on
its symbolical or ideal character. Through it God
expresses himself as the artist does, be he painter,
poet, or musician, through his work, blending the
various elements — the light and shade, the good
and the bad, the positive and the negative — into a
vital, harmonious whole. Creation becomes a pic-

26

MANIFOLD NATURE

ture, or a drama, or a symphony, in which all life
plays its part, in which all scenes and conditions,
all elemental processes and displays, play their part
and unite to make a vast artistic whole. The con-
tradictions in life, the high lights, the deep shadows,
the imperfections, the neutral spaces, are but the
devices of the artist to enhance the total effect of
his work. In ethics and religion we ask of a thing:
“Ts it good?” In philosophy: “Is it true?” In sci-
ence: “Is it a fact, and verifiable?”’ But in art we
ask: “Is it beautiful?” or “Is it a real creation?”
“Ts it one with the vital and flowing currents of the
world?”

The artist alone is the creator among men; he is
disinterested; he has no purpose but to rival Na-
ture; he subordinates the parts to the whole; he il-
lustrates the divine law of indirections. The bald,
literal truth is not for him, but the illusive, the sug-
gestive, the ideal truth. He does not ask what life or
Nature are for, or are they good or bad, but he in-
terprets them in terms of the relation of their parts,
he reads them in the light of his own soul. He knows
there is no picture without shadows, no music with-
out discords, no growth without decay. The artist
has “no axe to grind”’; to him all is right with the
world, however out of joint it may be in our self-
seeking lives. Art is synthetic, and puts a soul under
the ribs of Death. Science is a straight line, but Art
is symbolized by the curve.

Q7

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

To regard Nature, therefore, as the art of God,
is to see it complete in itself; all the disharmonies
vanish, all our perplexing problems are solved.
The earth and the heavens are not for our private
good alone, but for all other things. Opposites are
blended. Good and bad are relative; heaven and
hell are light and shade in the same picture. Our
happiness or our misery are secondary; they are the
pigments on the painter’s palette. The beauty of
Nature is its harmony with our constitution; its
terror emphasizes our weakness.

Where does the great artist get his laws of art but
from his insight into the spirit and method of Na-
ture? They are reflected in his own heart; the act of
creation repeats itself m his own handiwork. The
true artist has no secondary aims — not to teach or
to preach, nor to praise nor condemn; but to por-
tray, and to show us, through the particular, the
road to the universal.

Eckermann reports Goethe as saying to him that
“Nature’s intentions are always good”; but if
questioned, Goethe would hardly have maintained
that the clouds, the winds, the streams, the tides,
gravity, cohesion, and so on, have intentions of any
sort, much less intentions directed to us or away
from us. Even the wisest among us thus make man
the aim and object of Nature. We impose our own
psychology upon the very rock and trees.

Goethe always read into Nature his own human

28

MANIFOLD NATURE

traits; always when he speaks of her he speaks as an
artist and poet. He says to Eckermann that Nature
“is always true, always serious, always severe; she
is always right, and the errors and faults are always
those of man. The man who is incapable of appre-
ciating her, she despises; and only to the apt, the
pure, the true, does she resign herself and reveal her
secrets. The understanding will not reach her; man
must be capable of elevating himself to the highest
Reason to come into that contact with the Divinity
which manifests in the primitive phenomena which
dwell behind them and from which they proceed.
The divinity works in the living, not in the dead; in
the becoming and changing, not in the become and
the fixed. Therefore, reason, with its tendency to-
ward the divine, has only to do with the becoming,
the living; but understanding has to do with the be-
come, the already fixed, that it may make use of
it.” In this last we see the germ of Bergson’s philoso-
phy. The divinity that dwells behind phenomena,
and from which they proceed, is the attempt of the
human mind to find the end of that which has no
end, the law of causation.

Ill
EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

“Proud man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’

‘See all for mine,’ replies the pampered goose.”

ND the pampered goose was right: all things

are just as much for her use as for man’s,
while there are reasonable doubts whether things
‘were created for the especial use of either.

Man, like the goose, appropriates what suits him,
but is slow to realize the fact that what suits him, or
is fitted to his use, depends upon his own powers of
adaptation. We can say that he suits it, rather than
that it suits him. He has lungs because there is air,
and eyes because there are certain vibrations in the
ether. In short, nature is the primary fact, and the
forms and organs of life the secondary fact.

Goethe said to Eckermann that he followed Kant
in looking upon each creature as existing for its own
sake. He could not believe, he said, that the cork-
trees grow merely that we might stop our bottles,
and, he might have added, that rubber-trees grow
that we might have rubber overshoes. The lady in a
public audience who once asked me what flies are
for, evidently thought that God had made a mistake
in creating that which annoyed her. I was pleased
with a remark of John Muir’s in his Sierra book

30

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

about the poison ivy: “‘Like most other things not
apparently useful to man,” he says, “it has few
friends, and the blind question, ‘ Why was it made?”
goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it
might have been made for itself.’’ Coming from the
mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical
doctrine. Muir had evidently forgotten his early
training.

It is possible for man to make use of poison ivy;
in fact it is used in medicine; but who shall dare to
say that it was made for that? Flies and poison ivy
and all other noxious and harmful things are each
and all for their own sakes. They were not made in
the sense that we make things. They have come to
‘be what we now find them through the action and
interaction of a thousand complex influences. Each
has found its place in the scheme of living things,
and each acts directly or indirectly upon other
forms — is of use to them, or the reverse. Ten thou-
sand things are of use to man, and as many more of
no use to him, but to measure all things by his
standard of utility is childish, or to ask what mos-
quitoes and rattlesnakes are for, with an implied
impeachment of Nature if they are not of service to
man, is an idle question. The water and the air are
indispensable to life, but these things are older than
life. Life is adapted to them, and not they to it.

The body is full of fluids because earth and air are
full of water. From our standpoint man is at the

31

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

head of animate nature, but the rest of creation is
no more exclusively for him than for the least of
living things. The good of the world is for whatever
or whoever can use it. Houseflies are undoubtedly
the enemy of the human race; so are mosquitoes, so
are venomous snakes, so are many forms of bacteria,
and a thousand other things. Our egotism prompts
us to ask, “‘ Why is evil in the world, anyhow?” But
our evil may be the good of some other creature.
Our defeat means the triumph of our enemy. It is
through this conflict of good and evil, or of things
that are for us with things that are against us, that
species are developed and perpetuated.

What kind of a world would it be without what
we call evil, without hindrances? To the farmer
drought, flood, tornadoes, untimely frosts are evils
which he thinks he could well dispense with, but
so far as they make a greater struggle necessary, so
far as they lead to more self-denial, greater fore-
thought, and so on, they are good in disguise.
Hardy, virile characters, like tough timber, in oaks,
are developed by unfriendly and opposing forces.
Intemperance, greed, cheating, lying, war, are evils
in the social and business world; but they teach us
the value of their opposites. We react from them. It
is a child’s question to ask, for example, “Would
the world not have been better had there never been
any war?” because, since mankind is what it is,
wars are inevitable. The absence of wars, as of in-

32

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

temperance, greed, cheating, implies a different
mankind, and a different mankind implies a differ-
ent system of things.

The problem of evil is the problem of life; no evil,
no life. The world is thus made. Nature is not half
good and half bad; she is wholly good, or wholly
bad, according to our relation to her. Fire and flood
are bad when they master us, and good when we
master and control them. Great good has come out
of war, and great evil. The evil always tends to drop
out or be obliterated, as the path of cyclones and
earthquakes tend to be overgrown and forgotten.
Burned cities often rise from their ashes to new life.
The effects of evil are finally obliterated; malignant
forces have their day, benignant forces go on for-
ever. The world of life, let me repeat, would not be
here were not the balance of the account of good
and evil on the side of the good, or if good did not
come out of evil.

Life is recuperative; if it falls down, it picks itself
up again. If a state is devastated by war, in time the
cities and towns are rebuilt, and the ranks of peace
and industry refilled, though the growth and civili-
zation of that country may have had a terrible set-
back, and the whole progress of the race be re-
tarded. Evil perishes. The terrible World War, set
going by Germany, has depleted the wealth, the
life, the well-being of the whole European world,
but as the scars it made upon the landscape will in

33

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

time be effaced, so its effect upon the life of the
states and communities will fade and be a memory
only. Still the evils it entailed are none the less de-
plorable. Its heritage of hate, of devastated homes,
of depleted treasures, will long continue.

Life, then, in all its forms is for its own sake. It is
an end in itself. Many things are inimical to us, and
we are equally inimical to many things. We lay the
whole of Nature under contribution so far as we can,
and we curb and defeat her hostile forces so far as
we can, but the world was no more made for man
than it was made for mice and midges. When we see
how irrespective of us the natural forces go their
way, that we can ride them and guide them only as
we do wild horses — by being quicker and more
masterful than they are — when we know that they
will tread us down with the same indifference that
we tread down the grass and the weeds, the facts
should temper and modify our egotism. When we
look into the depths of merely our own solar system,
and see vast globes like Jupiter and Saturn, so

much older and greater than our little earth, and
~ not yet the abode of any form of life, and probably
not within millions of years of such a state, how
casual and insignificant man seems! How far from
being the end and object of creation!

Doubtless there are numberless worlds and whole
systems of worlds in the depths of sidereal space
upon which life has never appeared, and number-

34

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

less other worlds and systems upon which it has had
its day and gone out forever. Life is but an incident
in the total scheme of things.

To ask what this or that is for, with reference to
ourselves, and to conclude that some one or some-
thing has blundered if it is not of positive use to us,
is, let me repeat, to see and to think as a child. We
know what the hooks on the burdock and the stick-
seed are for, and what the wings on the maple and
the ash-seed are for, but do we know what the stings
on the nettle, or the spines on the blackberry or on
the thorn-apple tree are for? The cattle eat the
nettle, the birds eat the berries, and the wild crea-
tures eat the thorn-apple. How could their seeds
get sown if the prickles and thorns defended them
against wild life? Spines and thorns seem expressive
of moods or conditions in Nature, and to be quite
independent of use, as we understand the term.

Nature’s ways are so unlike our ways! Her sys-
tem of economics would soon bring us to bank-
ruptcy. She has no rival, no competitor, no single
end in view, no more need to store up wealth than
to scatter it. One form gains what another form
loses. Humanly speaking, she is always trying to de-
feat herself. The potato-bug, if left alone, would ex-
terminate the potato and so exterminate itself; the
eurrant-worm would exterminate the currant; the
forest worms would exterminate the forests, did not
parasites appear and check these ravages. Nature

35

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

trumps her own trick; she scuttles her own ship; she
mines her own defenses; she poisons her own foun-
tains; she sows tares in her own wheat; and yet she
wins, because she is the All. The tares are hers, the
parasites are hers, the devastating storms and
floods are hers, the earthquakes and volcanoes are
hers, disease and death are hers, as well as youth
and health. The cancer that eats into a man’s vitals
— what keeps it going but Nature’s forces and
fluids? The bacteria that flourish in our bodies and
bring the scourges of typhoid fever, diphtheria,
tuberculosis, are all hers, and a part of her system
of things. A malignant tumor is as much an expres-
sion of Providence as is a baby or a flower. Nature
cuts the ground from under her own feet; she saws
off the limb upon which she is perched, but if she
falls, she alights in her own lap.

In walking through a blighted potato-field this
morning, I said, “‘Here is one form of vegetable life
destroying another form and bringing loss and dis-
content to the farmer’s heart.” What purpose in the
economy of Nature is served by this blight? Who or
what is the gainer? After the minute organisms that
prey upon the potato-vines have done their work,
they too perish, so that two forms of life are blotted
out. What was it all for? Why is this tragedy of one
form of life bringing to naught other forms, which
we witness on every hand, in vegetable and animal
life, and in human history, being constantly en-

36

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

acted? The question, put in this way, is a purely
human one; it is applying to the vast scheme of
creation purely human standards. We instinctively
ask the why and the wherefore of things, and in our
practical lives try to avoid letting one hand defeat
the other as Nature does in the above incident. We
guard one form of life against another hostile form.
Our aim is to make things pull together for our own
advantage. We seek to check the ravages of the tent
caterpillar, the forest worms, the gypsy moth, the
potato-beetle, and the invisible enemies that rot our
grapes and mar our apples, as well as the germs that
sow fatal diseases in our midst. But not so Nature.
She does not take sides. As I have said, she has
no special and limited aims. The stakes are hers,
whoever wins. One condition of the season favors
the growth of the potato-vines; another condition
favors the development of the fungus that destroys
them. Nature is just as much on the side of the rat
as on the side of the cat; she arms each to defeat the
other, and the fittest survives. She has not given
the rabbit strength or ferocity, but she has given
her speed and a sleepless eye and great fecundity,
and her enemies do not cut her off.

The struggle and competition of life go on every-
where. But life is not all a struggle; it is unity and
codperation as well. The trees of the forest protect
one another; one form of life profits by another
form.

37

_ ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

In the whole drama of organic nature we find
waste and prodigality. Our economics are set at
naught by the power that works to no special ends,
but to all ends, and finds its account in the tumor
that eats up the man, as much as in the man him-
self, in the fungi that destroy the potato crop, or the
chestnut-trees, as truly as in these things them-
selves. Yet behold what specialization and what
development has taken place in spite of these cross-
purposes, this chaos of conflicting interests! Out of
discord has come harmony; out of conflict has come
peace; out of death has come life; out of the reptile
has come the bird; out of the beast has come man;
out of the savage has come the moral conscience;
out of the tribe has come the nation; out of tyranny
has come democracy. It is the waste, the delays, the
pain, the price to be paid, that appall us.

We must regard creation as a whole, as the evo-
lution of worlds and systems, and not concentrate
our attention upon man and his ways, or upon the
earth — so small a part of our solar system.

Our benevolent institutions are not types of the
universe; our idea of fatherhood does not fit the
Eternal.

Our fathers had a complete and consistent ex-
planation of the problem of evil that so perplexes us.
They invented or postulated two opposing and con-
tending principles in the world — one divine, the
other diabolical. One they named God, the other,

38

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

Satan. Their conception of God would not allow
them to saddle all the evil and misery of the world
upon him; they had to look for a scapegoat, and
they found him in the Devil. One is just as necessary
to a consistent cosmogony as the other. If we must
have an all-wise, all-merciful, all-powerful, all-loving
God — the author of all good and the contemner
of all evil — we must also have a god of the oppo-
site type, the great mischief-maker and enemy of
human happiness — the author of war, pestilence,
famine, disease, and of all that hinders and defeats
the reign of the perfect good. Without the concep- ~
tion of the Devil, we are forced to the conclusion,
either that God is not omnipotent, or that he is re-
sponsible for all the sin and suffering in the world.
If you make man this Devil, then who made
man?

Wrestle with the problem as we may, we are im-
paled on one or the other horn of the dilemma.
Our traditional God is more cruel and more indiffer-
ent to human suffering than any tyrant that ever
gloated over human blood and agony, or else he is
fearfully limited in his power for good.

With a Devil at our disposal to whom we can im-
pute the evils of life, the situation clears up, and
God emerges, shorn of his omnipotence, it is true,
but still the symbol of goodness and love.

In our day the Devil has lost his prestige and is
much discredited. As a power in men’s minds his

39

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

reign is over, and hell, his headquarters, no longer
casts its lurid light upon human life.

In an equal measure the old Hebraic conception
of God as a much-magnified man, the king and.
ruler of heaven and earth, with heaven as his throne
has gone out. God is now little more than a name
for that tendency or power in the universe which
makes for righteousness, and which has brought
evolution thus far on its course.

To account for the world as we find it, we are
compelled to look upon it as the inevitable result
of the clashing and interaction of purely natural
forces resulting in both so-called good and evil; that
is, in what is favorable to life, and in what is against
life. But as life is adaptive and assimilative, it slowly
turns the evil into good, of course at the expense of
delays and waste and suffering, and thus develop-
ment becomes possible, and man, after untold mil-
lions of years, appears.

When we look forth upon the universe, what do |
we see? When we look upon the non-living world,
we see a mere welter and chaos of material forces —
a conflict of chemical and physical principles seek-
ing a stable equilibrium — water running, winds
blowing, mountains decaying, stars and systems
whirling, suns waning or waxing, nebuls condens-
ing, vast orbs colliding, and all issuing in a certain
order and system under the rule of purely mechani-
cal and mathematical laws. The stellar universe is a

40:

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

vast machine, amenable to the measurements and
calculations of the astronomers. The eclipses all
occur exactly on time, and the planets revolve in
their orbits without the untruth, as Whitman says,
of a single second. The disorder and disruptions
which occur are inside of vast fundamental laws.
Our mountains and seas are shaken by earthquakes,
and the earth’s surface is swept by cyclones and the
seashores are devastated by tidal waves, yet these
things are only phases of the effort toward a fixed
equilibrium. The earth’s surface as we now behold
it, the distribution of land and water, of mountain
and plain, the procession of the seasons, our whole
weather system, the friendly and the unfriendly
forces, are all the outcome of this clash and stress
of the physical forces, which make a paradise of
some places and the opposite of others.

When we look upon the living world as revealed
in the geologic record, we still see a kind of welter
and chaos, but we also see the advent of new prin-
ciples not entirely subject to mechanical and mathe-
matical laws. Life goes its way and takes liberties
with its physical environment. Living bodies change
and develop as the non-living do not. The various
organic forms “‘rise on stepping-stones of their dead
selves,” and inealculably slow transformations of
lower forms into higher take place, but not without
appalling delays and waste and suffering. Chemical
and mechanical laws are still in full force, but they

Al

5]

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

appear to be in the service of a new principle; an
organizing tendency of a new kind is at work in the
world; chance and necessity seem to play a less con-
spicuous part. Yet there is nothing that meets our
idea of justice, or mercy, or economy of effort.

For millions upon millions of years the earth
swarmed with low, all but brainless creatures. The
monsters of sea and land that appeared in the mid-
dle period were huge and terrible in body and limb,
but very small in capacity of brain. Huge ganglions,
or knots of nervous tissue, in different parts of their
bodies seem to have served as a substitute for a cen-
tralized brain and a complex nervous system. The
brontosaurus, seventy feet long, with a body weigh-
ing many tons, had a head not much larger than a
man’s double fists. Brains as yet played a very sub- :
ordinate part in the world. Reptiles and half-reptiles
possessed the earth. The age of mammals was as yet
only hinted at. But after long geologic ages, mam-
mals came to the front, holding the precious possi-
bility of man, and reptiles were relegated to the rear.
The animal brain increased, wit began to get the
better of brute force, and the small and feeble ances-
tors of man appeared in the biological drama. They
were like small and timid supernumeraries skulk-
ing or hiding on the wings of the stage. Lemurs and
monkeys appeared long before there were any signs
of the anthropoid apes, and the anthropoid apes were
in evidence long before the first rude man appeared.

42

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

In all the vast stretch of geologic and biologic
time, do we see any evidence of the active existence
of the God and the Devil of our fathers? Not unless
we identify them with the material forces that then
ruled and shaped the world, and these forces, by any
other name, are of the same impersonal, impartial,
unforgiving character as is disclosed in our dealings
with them to-day.

When we turn to the higher forms of organic life,
especially to man and his history, what do we see?
We still behold the same trial-and-error method,
the same cruelty, waste, delays, and suffering that
we behold in the lower forms. We see progress, we
see the growth of ethical principles, we see man’s
. Increasing mastery over the forces of nature and
over himself, but in the competition of races and na-
tions, the race is still to the swift and the battle to
the strong. We see a high standard of individual
morality contending with a low standard of interna-
tional morality. We still see civilized nations look-
ing upon treaties as “‘scraps of paper”; we see them
regarding their neighbors as rivals and enemies; we
see millions of men that have not the shadow of
a grievance against one another, fiercely trying to
slay one another, and praying to the same God for
victory. We see the nefarious doctrine that physical
might makes moral right written in lines of blood
and fire across the face of whole kingdoms; we see
the legitimate competitions of peace and industry

43

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

turned into the strife of armed conquest; we see a
small and peaceful nation trampled underfoot by a
big nation bent upon plunder and conquest; we see
hatred toward a kindred nation glorified, and the
murder of innocent women and children and other
non-combatants adopted as a fixed policy; in fact,
we see all the vast resources of science and of mod-
ern civilization wedded to the spirit of the Hun, and
turned loose in a war for world-dominion. The re-
sults of eighteen centuries of Christian culture come
off the German nation like a whitewash in this craze
and fury of the military spirit; the German people
stand revealed as at heart unmitigated barbarians,
wonderfully efficient, but wonderfully inhuman. If
we appeal to the supernatural to account for things,
we certainly need a Devil, if not several of them, to
account for the temper of the German mind during
the late war. No wonder the good people are losing
faith, and are shocked and dismayed at the thought
that their all-loving, omnipotent God permits these
things.

Down the whole course of history we see no other
powers at work than those that are about us. Good
is in the ascendancy everywhere, or soon will be;
evil dies out; the wicked cease from troubling; the
amelioration of mankind goes on; and no God or
Devil hinders or favors.

Nature is both God and Devil, and natural law is
supreme in the world. The moral consciousness of

Ad

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

man, — all our dreams of perfection, of immortality,
of the good, the beautiful, the true, all our venera-
tion and our religious aspirations, —this is Nature,
<00.

Man is a part of the universe; all that we call
good in him, and all that we call bad, are a part of the
universe. The God he worships is his own shadow
cast upon the heavens, and the Devil he fears is
his own shadow likewise. The divine is the human,
magnified and exalted; the satanic is the human,
magnified and debased.

We find God in Nature by projecting ourselves
there; we find him in the course of history by read-
ing our own ideals into human events; we find him
in our daily lives by listening to the whisperings of
our own inherited and acquired consciences, and by
dwelling upon the fatality that rules our lives.

We had nothing to do with our appearance here
in this world, or with the form our bodies take, or
with our temperaments, and, only in a degree, with
our dispositions. Some power other than ourselves
brought us here and maintains us here for a period,
as it brought here and maintains all other forms of
life; but, I repeat, that power is inseparable from
the physical and chemical forces, and goes its way
whether we prosper or perish. Yet it is more posi-
tive than negative, more for us than against us, else
we should not be here.

Where does man get his ethical standards? Where

45

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

does he get his eyes, his ears, his heart? He gets
them where he got his life — from natural sources.
He gets them whence he got his sense of art, of
beauty, of harmony. There are no moral standards
in Nature apart from man, but as man is a part of
Nature, so are these, and all other standards. So are
all religions, arts, literatures, philosophies, hero-
isms, self-denials, as well as all idolatries, supersti-
tions, sorceries, cruelties, wrongs, failures, a part of
Nature.

Is the big-brained man of to-day any less a part of
Nature than the low-browed, long-jawed man of
Pliocene times?

The humanization of God leads us into many
difficulties. If He is a personal being with attributes
and emotions like our own, then we are forced to the
conclusion that He is no better than we are — that
He has our faults as well as our virtues, our cruelty
as well as our love. He is a party to all the wrongs
and crimes and suffering that darken the earth; He
permits wars and pestilence and famine and earth-
quakes and tornadoes, and all the consuming and
agonizing diseases that flesh is heir to. He is an in-
finite man with infinite powers for good and evil.

In the long drama of animal evolution there has
evidently been as much suffering as pleasure, and of
the drama of human history the same may be said:
pain, failure, delay, injustice, to all of which our
humanized God has been a party. No wonder our

46

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

fathers struggled over the problem of the ways of
God to man. As soon as they put themselves in his
place, they felt the need of some grounds upon which
to justify his dealings with the beings He had cre-
ated. But they searched, and their descendants still
search, in vain. If we see God as a man, no matter
how mighty, He is still guilty of what few finite men
would be guilty. What men would be guilty of per-
mitting the sin and misery that fill the world at this,
or any other, time?

The Nature God neither sends calamities nor
wills them — they are an inevitable part of the
growth and development of things; they are eddies
in the stream of forces. What we call evil is evil only
from our point of view; evil is a human word and
not the word of the Infinite. If the world were some-
thing made by a Maker external to it, then it were
pertinent to ask, Why not make it a better world?
Why not leave out pain and sin and all other phases
of evil? But the world is not something made, and it
did not have a Maker, as we use those words. The
universe zs, and always has been, “from everlasting
to everlasting,” and man is a part of it, and his life
is subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of cre-
ation. Man has come into this sense of right and
wrong, of justice and mercy, of truth and false-
hood, of good and evil, as necessary conditions of
his development, but those things are not abso-
lute; they pertain to him alone. The physical forces

47

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

break out of their natural bounds and run riot for a
season; the human forces do the same thing and
give rise to various excesses. The crimes and mis-
demeanors of man are exceptional as the outbreaks
:n nature are exceptional. They relate man to na-
ture and show how the same plan runs through both.
A world with storm and the warring and violence
of the elements left out would be a radically differ-
ent world — an impossible world. And a world of
man, a Quaker world, is equally impossible.

If some being of infinite wisdom and love had
made the world and made man to live in it, we could
ask him some embarrassing questions; but, let me
repeat, the world was not made, it is only a link ina
chain of cosmic events, and it is not for man any
more than for any other creature. Each must “work
out his own salvation, with fear and trembling.”

Introduce design into nature and you humanize
it and get into difficulties at once. It is above design.
We have no language in which to speak the ultimate
truth, no language in which to describe the charac-
ter and the doings of the Infinite. The ways of the
Infinite are not only past finding out, they are un-
speakable by reason of our finite relations to them.
We cannot arraign the Nature God. It does not de-
sign, nor make, nor govern, nor employ means to
ends, as do the man-made gods. It zs. All things are
a part of its infinite complexity. Nature rests for-
ever in itself. It neither fails nor succeeds. In itself

48

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

it is neither good nor evil, neither divine nor devilish;
it is all things to all men, because they are all things
to it. It is neither one nor many; it is the Infinite. In
these vain attempts to define or describe the inde-
finable I have no language but that of the finite, no
language but that of our limited or circumscribed
relation to the world of concrete and fragmentary
things. Hence I am constantly like the plains ranger
caught by his own lasso, or the angler caught by his
own hook.

Emerson said that in trying to define the Eternal
we need a language that differs from our everyday
speech as much as algebra differs from arithmetic.
Outside of the physical organism there is neither
pleasure nor pain, good nor bad, light nor dark,
sound nor silence, heat nor cold, big nor little, hard
nor soft ; all these things are but words in which
we describe our sensations. When there is no ear,
there is no sound, but only motion in the air; when
there is no eye, there is no light or color, but only
motion in the ether; when there are no nerves,
there is no heat or cold, but only motion, more or
less, in the molecules of matter. Degrees and dif-
ferences belong to the region of our finite minds.
In trying to define or state the Infinite, we are off
the sphere, outside the realm of experience, and
our words have no meaning.

It is the circular or orbicular character of creation
that baffles us. We cannot fit the sphere into the

49

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

triangles and parallelograms of the terms of our ex-
perience. We cannot square the circle of Infinity.
The terms “love,” “anger,” “mercy,” “father-
hood,” do not apply to God any more than “over”
or “under,” or “‘ beginning” or “‘end,” apply to the
sphere. In regard to God, the language of science
and mathematics is one with the language of wor-
ship and ecstasy.

I find I have never been burdened by a sense of
my duty to God. My duty to my fellow-men and to
myself is plain enough, but the word is not adequate
to express any relation I may hold to the Eternal.
Do I owe any duty to gravity without which I could
not move or lift my hand, or any duty to the sun-
shine or to the rains and the winds? Instinctively,
unconsciously, for the most part we obey the law of
gravity, and instinctively we adjust ourselves to all
the natural forces, not from a sense of duty, but
from a sense of self-preservation. These things are
a part of our lives and not something to which we
hold only a casual and precarious or external rela-
tion. My relation to the Eternal is not that of an in-
ferior to a superior, or of a beneficiary to his bene-
factor, or of a subject to his king. It is that of the
leaf to the branch, of the fruit to the tree, of the
babe in the womb to its mother. It is a vital and an
inevitable relation. It cannot be broken. It is not a
matter of will or choice. We are embosomed in the
Eternal Beneficence, whether we desire it or not.

50

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

Those good persons who go through life looking
upon the Eternal as a power external to themselves,
saluting him as the soldier salutes his officer, are not
as truly religious as they think they are. The old
conception of an external God, the supreme ruler of
the universe, with whom Moses talked and walked
and even saw the hinder parts of, is out of date in
our time. Still the overarching thought of the In-
finite and the Eternal, in whom we live and move
and have our being, must at times awaken in the
minds of all of us, and lend dignity and sobriety to_
our lives.

But the other world fades as this world brightens.
Science has made this world so interesting and won-
derful, and our minds find such scope in it for the
exercise of all their powers, that thoughts of another
world are becoming foreign to us. We shall never
exhaust the beauties and the wonders and the
possibilities of this. To feel at home on this planet,
and that it is, with all its drawbacks, the best pos-
sible world, I look upon as the supreme felicity of
life.

When we look at it in its mere physical and chemi-
cal aspects, its play of forces, tangible and intan-
gible, its reservoir of energy, its “journeying of
atoms,” its radiating electrons, its magnetic cur-
rents, its transmutations and cycles of change, its
hidden but potent activities, its streaming auroras,
its changing seasons, its myriad forms of life, and

51

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

a thousand other things —all make it a unique and
most desirable habitation.

When we consider it in its astronomical aspects
as a celestial body floating in the luminiferous ether
as in a sea, held in leash by the sun, and as sensitive
to its changes as the poplar leaf to the wind, vast
beyond our power to visualize, yet only a grain of
sand on the shores of the Infinite, an evening or a
morning star to the beings on other planets, if there
are such, mottled with shining seas or green and
white continents and canopied with many-hued
cloud draperies, and existing in closest intimacies
with the wonders and the potencies of the sidereal
heavens — a veritable fruit on the vast sidereal tree
of life — when we realize all this, and more, can we
conceive of a more desirable or a better-founded
and better-furnished world? The voyage we make
upon it may be a long one; if we claim the century of
life which Nature seems to have allotted us on con-
ditions, we shall travel about thirty-six billions of
miles in our annual voyages around the sun, and
how many more millions with the sun around his
sun, we know not. A world made of the common
stuff of the universe, a handful of the dust of the
cosmos, yet thrilling with life, producing the race of
man, evolving the brain of Plato, of Aristotle, of
Bacon, the soul of Emerson, of Whitman, the heart
of Christ — a heavenly abode surely. Let us try to
make amends for depreciating it, for spurning it,

52

EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

for surrendering it to the Devil, and for turning
from it in search of a better.

Our religion is at fault, our saints have betrayed
us, our theologians have blackened and defaced our
earthly temple, and swapped it off for cloud man-
sions in the Land of Nowhere. The heavens embrace
us always; the far-off is here, close at hand; the
ground under your door-stone is a part of the morn-
ing star. If we could only pull ourselves up out of
our absorption in trivial affairs, out of the petty
turmoil of our practical lives, and see ourselves and
our world in perspective and as a part of the celes-
tial order, we could cease to weep and wail over our
prosaic existence.

The astronomic view of our world, and the Dar-
winian view of our lives must go together. As one
came out of the whirling, fiery nebul, so the other
came out of the struggling, slowly evolving, bio-
logical world of the unicellular life of the old seas.

Biologic time sets its seal upon one, and cosmic
time upon the other. Dignity and beauty and mean-
ing are given to our lives when we see far enough
and wide enough, when we see the forces that min-
ister to us, and the natural order of which we form
a part. »

IV
THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

HAT bodies rise in the air does not disprove

gravity; on the contrary, it proves it. The pull
of gravity never lets go of the bullet from the gun;
no matter how high or how far it goes, down it
comes, sometime, somewhere.

Without this pull the gun would have no power.
There is no force when there is nothing to resist
force. The force of the chemical reaction in the gun
on the explosion of the powder is hurled back by the
weight and resistance of the gun, all the result of
gravity, and sends the bullet high or far, but does
not for a second break its hold upon it. Smoke rises
because the air falls; clouds float because of the
greater weight of something beneath them. The
river flows because its banks do not.

The goodness of nature is the universal fact, like
gravity, and its evils and enmities and hindrances
only prove the law. |

The waters of the globe seek their level, seek to
reach a haven of everlasting repose; but behold
how that purpose is forever frustrated, and the cur-
rents never cease. It is as if the creeks and rivers
never reached the sea; they are traveling that way
forever; it is as if the great ocean currents and sub-

54

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

marine Amazons and Mississippis were seeking an
escape which they never find; their quest is ever re-
newed. Nature is Nature because her work is never
complete; her journey is never ended; the fixity and
equilibrium which her elements appear to seek, is
ever deferred; life can appear and go on only in a
changing, unstable world, and it is this flux and
mutability of things that bring all our woe, and all
our joy as well. If winds did not blow, and bodies
fall, and fire consume, and floods overpower, if the
equilibrium of things were not perpetually broken,
— which opens the door to all our troubles and dis-
asters, — where should we find the conditions of our
life?

Life has appeared in an unstable world, and is
conditioned upon this instability. Fixity means
death. It is in the line of organic effort that living
forms appear; it is in an imperfect world that we
strive for the perfection that we never reach.
Blessed be the fact that our capacity for life, for
happiness, is always greater than the oy yields.
Satiety checks effort.

The Nature Providence is stern and even cruel
in some of its dealings with us, but not in all, else we
should run away from home. It is genial and friendly
in the genial season — in a June meadow, in a field
of ripening grain, in an orchard bending with fruit,
in the cattle on a thousand hills, in the shade of the
friendly trees, in the bubbling springs, in the paths

55

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

by the green fields and by still waters, and in ten
thousand other aspects of its manifold works. It
is not friendly in the tropical jungles, nor amid the
snows and blizzards of the polar regions, but upos
four fifths of the surface of the globe it may bc
said to be friendly or neutral. Man is armed to face
its hostile aspects and to turn its very wrath to
account. If God maketh the wrath of man to praise
Him, so man maketh the wrath of God to serve
him, as when he subdues and controls Nature’s de-
structive forces, tames the lightning and harnesses
Niagara. He has not bound the cyclone yet, nor
warmed himself by the volcano, nor moved moun-
tains from his path with the earthquake, but he
may do it yet. He is fast drawing the fangs of
contagious diseases, thus adding to his length of
days.

The Nature Providence working in man and
through him has made the world more fit for man’s
abode.

Action and reaction are the steps by which life
ascends. Nature acts upon man and man reacts
upon nature. The labor the farmer puts into the soil
comes back to him with interest, and enables him to
labor more. The capital of life grows in that way;
action and reaction; up we go.

“Are God and Nature then at strife?”’ asks Ten-
nyson, baffled and unsettled by what he sees about
hin. There is strife in the living world, the struggle

56

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

of existence. In the non-living, there is collision, dis-
ruption, overthrow. The apparent strife between
the two worlds is an effort toward adjustment on
the part of the living — to master and utilize the
non-living. The inorganic goes its way under the
leash of physical laws, heedless of the organic. Myr-
iads of living things are crushed and destroyed by
the ruthless onward flow of the non-living. There is
life in the world because life is plastic and persistent
and adaptive, and perpetually escapes from the
blind forces that would destroy it — the winds, the
floods, the frost, the heat, gravity, earthquakes,
chemical reactions, and so on. Every living thing
runs the gantlet of the insensate mechanical and
chemical forces. But this is not strife in our human
sense; it is the discipline of nature. No living thing
could begin or continue without these forces which
at times are so hostile. Like faithful gardeners pre-
paring the seed-beds, they prepared the earth for
the abode of man and all other living forms. They
made the soil, they bring the rains, they begat the
winds, they prearranged all the conditions of life;
but life itself is a mystery, the great mystery, super-
mechanical, super-chemical, dependent upon these
forces, but not begotten by them. They are its
servants.

The struggle in the world of living forms is a con-
dition of development, growing things are made
strong by the force of the obstacles they overcome.

57

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

From our limited human point of view there are
phases of creation that make it look like a game be-
tween intelligent contending forces, or as if one god
tried to undo the work of another god, or at least to
mar and hinder his work — some mischievous and
malignant spirit that sows tares amid the wheat,
that retards development, that invents parasites,
that produces the malformed, that scatters the
germs of disease. How much at heart Nature seems
to have the production and well-being of offspring,
yet what failures there are! in the human realm the
deformed, the monstrous, the idiotic. It seems as if
all things in heaven and earth had a stake in a per-
fect baby and in its growth and development. A
land swarming with beautiful and happy children
should make the very stars rejoice. Motherhood
itself is a_ beautiful and divine symbol, yet what
perils attend it! In many cases mother and child
sink into the same grave. Then along comes some
malignant spirit and sows the germs of infantile pa-
ralysis, and great numbers of children perish, and
still greater numbers are crippled and deformed for
life. What a miscarriage of nature is that! What
a calamity, and unmitigated evil!

When an insect stings a leaf or plant-stalk and
the plant forthwith builds a cradle and nursery for
the young of the insect, that is one form of life using
another form; or when a parasitical bird, such as
the European cuckoo, or our cowbird, lays its egg in

58

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

the nest of another bird, that is the same thing —
life is still triumphant. But when the germs of a
contagious disease — tuberculosis, diphtheria, scar-
let fever — invade the human system and finally
result in its destruction, then dissolution is trium-
phant; all this delicately and elaborately organized
matter comes to naught. In this we see the failure
of the tendency or impulsion in matter which re-
sults in organization — the mystery and the miracle
of vitality, as Tyndall called it, and the triumph
of the contrary impulse or disorganization, unless
we regard the destructive and death-dealing germs
themselves as a triumph of organization, which,
from the scientific point of view, they surely are.
Then we have Nature playing one hand against the
other. From our point of view it is like pulling
down a temple and reducing the bricks and stones
to dust for the use of ants. But who shall say that
Nature is not just as careful of the ant as of the
man? — which is, of course, a distasteful bit of
news to the man.

When one thinks of the myriads of minute living
organisms that pervade and make up his own body,
of their struggles and activities, their antagonisms
and coéperations, their victories and defeats, — the
cells codperating and building up the organs, the
organs codperating and building up the body, the
phagocytes policing the blood and destroying the in-
vading germs, the intestinal flora contending with

59

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

one another for the possession of the soil, the fer-
ments, the enzymes, — when one thinks of all this
and more, and how little aware the man is of all
this strife and effort and activity within him, —
how he himself, body and mind, 1s the result of it
all,—one has a dim vision of all our strife and effort
in this world as a part of the vital movements of a
vast system of things, or of a Being that is no more
cognizant of our wars and struggles and triumphs
than we are of the histories of the little people that
keep up the functional integrity of our own systems.

Man can himself make short work of the ants
unless he encounters their devouring hosts in a
tropical jungle, in which case they may make
short work of him. He can often slay with his an-
tiseptics the disease germs that are destroying him,
but not always; the balance of nature is often on
their side. Whichever triumphs, Nature wins, be-
cause all are parts of her system. The capital in-
vested is hers alone. Man thinks a part of it is
his, because he forgets that he too is a part of
Nature, and that whatever is his, is hers.

How are we to reconcile the obvious facts of
evolution, namely, that throughout the biological
ages there has been an impulse in Nature steadily
working toward the development of man, with the
still more obvious fact that Nature cares no more
for the individual man than she does for the in-
dividual of any other species ? She will drown him,

60

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

starve him, freeze him, crush him, as quickly as she
will any other form of life. Is the account balanced
by the fact that she has given him the wit and the
power to avoid these calamities in a larger measure
than she has given them to any other creature? That
is the way the great mystery works. Every creature
is exposed to the hazards of its kind, but within its
reach are always the benefits and advantages of its
kind, and these latter have steadily kept in the lead.
The evolutionary impulse toward the horse, toward
the dog, toward the bird, has apparently been as
jealously guarded and promoted as the impulse to-
ward man. Man in his own conceit is at the head of
the animal kingdom, and the whole creation is for
him, though there are other animals that surpass
him in strength, speed, and endurance. But he
alone masters and makes servants of the inorganic
forces, and thus rules the world below him.

I set out to say that the beneficent force or
Providence that brought us here has had to struggle
with the non-beneficent in inert matter, and, at
times, with what looks like the deliberately malig-
nant in living matter; micro-organisms everywhere
lying in wait for tangible bodies and reducing them
back to the original dust out of which they came —
the work of one god being held up or wrecked by
another god. In the vegetable kingdom are blights
and scabs and many forms of fungus diseases; in
the animal are hostile bacteria and parasites work-

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ing without and within. Little wonder our fathers
had to invent a Devil, or a hierarchy of good and
evil spirits contending with one another, to explain
the enigmas of life! But that the good spirits have
prevailed over their enemies, that the Natural
Providence has been on our side, is, as I have
pointed out, proved by the fact that we are actu-
ally here, and that life is good to us.

The evil of the world is seen to be ingrained in the
nature of things, and it has been a spur to develop-
ment. All the great human evils have been dis-
ciplinary. There is always a surplusage, rarely just
enough and no more. The gods of life rarely make a
clean, neat job of it; there are needless pains, need-
less wastes, needless failures, needless delays. The
good of war — the fortitude, the self-denial, the
heroism — we cannot separate from the evil; the
good of avarice or greed — industry, thrift, fore-
sight — we cannot separate from the evil. The
wealth-gatherers keep the currents going, they sub-
due the wilderness, they reclaim the deserts, they
develop the earth’s resources, they extend the
boundaries of civilization, but the evils that follow
in their train are many and great. Yet how are we to
have the one without the other? Disease is also a
kind of trial by battle; it weeds out the weak, the
physically unfit, and hardens and toughens the
race.

The Natural Providence does not study economy,

62

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

it is not in business with rivals and competitors;
bankruptcy is not one of its dangers, it can always
meet its obligations; all the goods and all the gold
and silver in the universe belong to it. Its methods
are too vast and complex for our ideas of prudence
and economy. We cannot deal with the whole, but
only with its parts. There are no lines and bound-
aries to the sphere, and no well-defined cleavage
between the good and the evil in nature and in life.
The broad margin of needless misery and waste in
the life of a man as of a nation is a part of the in-
exactitude and indifference that pervades the whole
of nature. From the point of view of the Natural
Providence it does not matter, the result is sure;
but from our point of view — victims of cyclones,
earthquakes, wars, famines, pestilence as we are —
it matters a great deal. The streams and rivers
throughout the land are bearers of many blessings;
the evils they bring are minor and are soon for-
gotten.

The whole living world is so interrelated and inter-
dependent, and hinges so completely upon the non-
living, that our analysis and interpretation of it
must of necessity be very imperfect. But the crea-
tive energy works to no specific ends, or rather it
works to all ends. As every point on the surface of
the globe is equally on the top at all times, so the
whole system of living nature balances on any given
object. I saw a book of poems recently, called “The

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Road to Everywhere” — vague as Nature herself.
All her roads are roads to everywhere. They may
lead you to your own garden, or to the North Pole,
or to the fixed stars, or may end where they began.

Nature is a great traveler, but she never gets
away from home; she takes all her possessions along
with her, and her course is without direction, and
without beginning or end. The most startling con-
tradiction you can make expresses her best. She is
the sum of all opposites, the success of all failures,
the good of all evil.

When we think we have cut out Nature, we have
only substituted another phase; when our balloon
mounts in spite of gravity, it is still gravity that
makes it mount; when we clear the soil of its nat-
ural growth and plant our own crop, Nature is still
our gardener; we have only placed other seeds of
her own in her hands. When we have improved
‘upon her, we have only prevailed upon her to second
our efforts; we get ahead of her by following out the
hints she gives us; when we trump her trick, it is
with her own cards. When we fancy we assist Na-
ture, as we say that we do with our drugs, it is she
who gives the efficiency to the drugs. We may
fancy that the sun is in the heavens solely to give
light and warmth to the planets, which it surely
does, but behold, what a mere fraction of the light
and heat of the sun is intercepted by the slender
girdle of worlds that surround it! The rays go out

64

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

equally in all directions, they penetrate all space.
The sun, with reference to its light and heat, is at
the center of an infinite hollow sphere, and not one
millionth part of its rays falls upon the worlds that
circle around it. This is typical of Nature’s bounty.
The thought and solicitude of the creative energy
is directed to me and you personally in the same
wholesale way. The planets of our system are
lighted and warmed as effectually as if the sun shone
for them alone, and man is the beneficiary of the
heavens as completely as if indeed the whole crea-
tion were directed especially to him. Here is another
point: the night and darkness in nature are local and
limited; the universe is flooded with light; the black
shadows themselves are born of the light. Though
astronomers tell us that sidereal space is strewn with
dead worlds and extinct suns, give time enough and
they will all be quickened and rekindled. Light and
life are the positive facts in nature, darkness and
death the negative.

When we single out man and fix our attention
upon him as the sole end of creation, and judge the
whole by his partial standards, man —

“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law —

Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed” —

when we do this, all is confusion and contradiction.
Love is “‘creation’s final law,”’ but not the love of
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

the mother for her child, or even of the bird for its
young, but the love of the eye for the light, of the
flower for the sun, the love of the plants for the rain
and the dew, the love of man for his kind, and of the
dog for his kind. Attraction, affiliation, assimila-
tion — like unto like is the rule of life.

The organism fits itself to its environment; the
Providence in Nature enables it to do so. The light
is not fitted to the eye; the light creates the eye; the
vibrations in the air create the ear. God, or the
Eternal, is love because He brooded man into being,
and all other forms of life that support man. He
made the heavens and the earth for man’s good, by
making man a part of them and able to avail him-
self of their bounty. But when we look forth into
the universe, and expect to see something like hu-
man care and affection in the operation of the great
elemental laws and forces, we are bound to be
shocked. It is not there, and well that it is not. A
universe run on the principles of human economy,
human charity, and partiality would be a failure.
It is our human weakness that yearns for this. It
is our earthly father that has begotten in us our
conception of a heavenly father. But then this very
conception and desire is a part of nature — springs
from the Eternal, and is in that sense authen-
tic. We cannot separate ourselves from nature, or
from the Eternal, any more than we can jump off
the planet. It is only the conception of a human or

66

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

man-made God that men rebel against. Thus comes
in the discord that Tennyson sees and feels. He is
looking for a human providence in nature. Wisdom,
love, mercy, justice, are human attributes. We call
them divine, and it is well, but they do not exist
outside of man. Man is himself the only God, and
he was evolved from nature. The divine and the
godlike are therefore in nature; yes, in conjunction
with what we call the demoniacal — love twined
with enmity, the good a partner with the bad.
**T bring to life, I bring to death;
The spirit does but mean the breath.”

Plagues and famines and wars are fortuitous and
not a part of the regular order like health, or growth,
or development. They are accidents of nature. The
cloud-burst that sends the creek out of its banks is
an accident in the same sense; it is an exceptional
occurrence. If the fountains of nature were not full
enough and permanent enough to stand such drains,
or if the tendency in nature to a certain order and
moderation were less marked, life would disappear -
from the globe. Nature’s capital of life is invested in
ten thousand enterprises and the risks are many, but
if the gains did not exceed the losses, if more seeds
did not fall upon fertile places than upon barren,
if more babies did not survive than perish, what
would become of us? In our human schemes we aim
to cut out losses, waste, delays and failure, and
arraign the Eternal when it does not follow the

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

same methods. But so far as I can see all that the
Eternal aims at in the vast business of the universe
is to keep the capital unimpaired and live on the in-
come. The inroads which storms, pestilence, earth-
quakes make upon it are soon made good and some.
interest does accrue. Life does advance.

In the course of the biologic ages there has been a
great loss in species, apparently without any loss in
the development impulse. New species appear as
the old disappear. Nature’s investment in mere
size and brute strength was doubtless a good one
under the conditions, but she gradually changed it
and began to lay the emphasis upon size of brain
and complexity of nervous system, just as man in
his material civilization has passed from the simple
to the complex, from the go-cart to the automobile,
from the signal fires to telegraph and telephone.
The failures and shortcomings of the Eternal, as
well as the progress of its work, are analogous to
those of man. Indeed, God is no more a god than
man is. He evinces the same methods, the same
mixture of good and evil, the same progress from
the simple to the complex, the same survival of
the fittest. We exalt and magnify our little human
attributes and name it God; we magnify and in-
tensify our bad traits and call it the Devil. One
is as real as the other. Both are real to the imagi-
nation of man, but Nature knows them not, except
so far as she knows them in and through man.

68

THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE

On a midsummer day, calm, clear, warm, the
leaves shining, the grain and grass ripening, the
waters sparkling, the birds singing, we see and
feel the beneficence of Nature. How good it all is:
What a joy to be alive! If the day were to end in a
fury of wind and storm, breaking the trees, unroof-
ing the houses, and destroying the crops, we should
be seeing the opposite side of Nature, what we call
the malevolent side. Fair days now and then have
such endings, but they are the exception; living
nature survives them and soon forgets them. Their
scars may long remain, but they finally disappear.
Total nature is overpoweringly on the side of life.
But for all this, when we talk about the father-
hood of God, his loving solicitude, we talk in para-
bles. There is not even the shadow of analogy be-
tween the wholesale bounty of Nature and the care
and providence of a human father. Striding through
the universe goes the Eternal, crushed worlds on
one hand and worlds being created on the other;
no special act of love or mercy or guidance, but a
providence like the rains, the sunshine, the seasons.

When we say hard things about Nature — accuse
her of cruelty, of savagery, of indifference — we fall
short of our proper filial respect toward her. She is
the mother of us all; neither an indulgent mother,
nor a cruel stepmother. In many respects the gifts
she has lavished upon us only make her own poverty
the more conspicuous. Where she got the gift of

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

reason which she has bestowed upon man, together
with the sense of justice and of mercy, the moral
consciousness, the zesthetic perceptions, the capac-
ity for learning her secrets and mastering her
forees, are puzzling questions. We may say that
man achieved these things himself; but who or
what made him capable of achieving them, what
made him man, and out of the same elements that
his dog or his horse is made?

Nature does not reason; she has no moral con-
sciousness; she does not economize her resources;
she is not efficient, she is wasteful and dilatory, and
spends with one hand what she saves with the other.
She is blind; her method is the hit-and-miss method
of a man who fights in the dark. She hits her mark,
not because she aims at it, but because she shoots in
all directions. She fills the air with her bullets. She
wants to plant in yonder marsh her cat-tail flag, or
her purple loosestrife, and she trusts her seeds to
every wind that blows, and to the foot of every
bird that visits her marshes, no matter which way
they are going. And in time her marsh gets planted.
The pollen from her trees and plants drifts in clouds
in order that one minute grain of it may find the
pistil that is waiting for it somewhere in the next
wood or field. She trusts her nuts to every vaga-
bond jay or crow or squirrel that comes along, in
hopes that some of them will be dropped or hidden
and thus get planted. She trims her trees, and thins

70

THE UNIVERSAL BEN EFICENCE

her forests, or reforests her lands, in the most
roundabout, dilatory, and inefficient manner. No
plan, no system, no economy of effort or of material;
and yet she “gets there,” because she is not limited
as to time or resources. She is in business with un-
limited capital and unlimited opportunities; she has
no competitors; her stockholders are all of one
mind, and all roads lead to her markets. The winds,
the streams, the rains, the snows, fire, flood, tornado,
earthquake, are all her servitors. She does not stick
for the best end of the bargain, the gain is hers who-
ever wins.

But behold how she has endowed man to im-
prove upon all her slack and roundabout methods!
She enables him to cheat, and mislead, and circum-
vent her. He steals her secrets, he tames her very
lightnings, he forces her hand on a hundred occa-
sions; he turns her rivers, he levels her hills, he ob-
literates her marshes, he makes her deserts bloom as
the rose; he measures her atoms and surveys and
weighs her orbs; he reads her history in the rocks, he
finds out her ways in the heavens. He discovers the
most completely hidden thing in the universe, the
ether, and he has learned how to use it for his own
purposes; his wireless telegraphy turns it into a
news highway; above the seas, over the mountains,
and across continents, it carries his messages.

In man Nature has evolved the human from the
unhuman; she has evolved justice and mercy from

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

rapine and cruelty; she has evolved the civic from
the domestic, the state from the tribe..She has
evolved the Briton and the Frenchman from rude
prehistoric man. She has not yet got rid of the Hur
_ in the German, but she is fast getting rid of the
German in her overseas Germanic stock. The
bleaching process goes on apace. |

Man sees where Nature is blind; he takes a
straight cut where she goes far around. In him she
has added reason to her impulse, conscience to her
blind forces, self-denial to her self-indulgence, the
power of choice to her iron necessity. How well she
has done by man, man alone knows. How much he
is dependent upon her, he alone knows; how com-
pletely he is a part of her, he alone knows. We may
call man an insurgent in her world, as an English
scientist does, but he is her insurgent; she i inspires
him to insurrection, and she puts his weapons in his
hands. His cause is her cause, and his victories are
her victories.

Only by personifying Nature in this way, and
standing apart from her and regarding her ob-
jectively, can we contrast her methods aid her
spirit with our own. The mother she has beén to us
becomes apparent. In spite of all her short-comings
and delays and roundabout methods, here we are,
and here we wish to remain. -

VY!

i}

THE GOOD DEVILS

I

HIS is not an essay on the optimism of a moral-
ist, but on the optimism of a naturalist.

On the whole and in the long run, as I am
never tired of asserting, Nature is good. The uni-
verse has not miscarried. The celestial laws, as
Whitman says, do not need to be worked over and
réctified: It is good to be here, and it must be equally
~ good to go hence. With all the terrible things in
Nature, and all the cruel and wicked things in his-
tory, the world is good; life is good, and the Devil
himself plays a good part.

When Emerson in his Journal says, “It is very
odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She
is no saint,’ one wonders just what he means. Does
he expect gravity, or fire, or flood, or wind, or tide
to have scruples? Should the cat have scruples
about dining off the mouse or the bird, or the wolf
about making a meal of thelamb? or the plants and
trees have scruples about running their roots into
one another’s preserves, or cutting off one another’s
rain or sunshine? If our cowbird had the human
conscience, we should expect her to have scruples
about laying her egg in the nest of another bird

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

and thus shirking the labors and cares. of parent-
hood, and we should expect the jays and crows to
have scruples about eating up the eggs and young
of their feathered neighbors, if they, too, were.
endowed with conscience. But none of them are
troubled in this way, for the simple reason that
they are not human beings. They live below the
plane of man’s moral conscience. Chemistry and
the elementary forces have no scruples. Powder or
dynamite will blow up its maker as soon as it will
any one else. The rain does not scruple to spoil the
farmer’s hay, or the floods to wash away his house
and destroy its inmates.

We are childish when we marvel at the unscrupu-
lousness of Nature. Emerson often appealed to the
nature of things. It is in the nature of things that
they should be what we name unscrupulous; cer-
tainly Nature “‘is no saint,” and it is well for us that
she is not. If we identify Nature with what we call
God, as many do, then I am saying that it is well
for us that the Eternal is “‘no saint.” I suspect that
if the drama of life which has been enacted upon
the globe, and is still being enacted, had been
modeled upon the principle of sainthood, you and
I would not now be here. More’s the pity, you may
say, but there is no pity in Nature.

II

Is Nature then of the Devil? If we choose to name
74

THE GOOD DEVILS

it so, — if we choose to revert to the conception of
an earlier age, — yes, Nature, as we see her from our
limited human point of view, is more or less of the
Devil — half god and half demon, we may say; di-
vine in some of her manifestations and diabolical in
others, divine when she favors us and diabolical
when she is against us. But what we do not so read-
ily see is that in the long run the Devil is on our
side also, that he is the divine wearing a mask. The
Devil is the absence of something; he is a negative
quantity that stimulates the positive and sets and
keeps the currents going. Our breathing is the result
of a perpetual tendency to a vacuum in our lungs;
the growth of our bodies is the result of a codpera-
tion and agreement between the integrating and
disintegrating forces.

We control the Devil and make him our friend
when we control most of the forces of nature — the
fire, the wind, the waters, electricity, magnetism,
gravity, chemical affinity, and so on. If our hold
upon them slips, they destroy us. If we are not
watchful in our laboratories, the same chemistry
that builds up our bodies will blow our bodies to
atoms. The tornado, the earthquake, the volcano,
the thunderbolt, have all helped to make the earth
what we behold it. The floods have helped, the ava-
lanches have helped, frost and wind and snow, tropic
heat and arctic cold, have helped. These devils are
the hod-carriers that serve the divine mason — the

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

mixers and builders, the plowers and the planters,
the levelers and the engineer. Hence, I say: “Good
Devil, be thou my friend; you give me power, you
sharpen my wits, you make a man of me.”

This is the tangible, physical Devil; the intangi-
ble, moral Devil is not so easily dealt with. It is not
so easy to turn the spirit of crime, intemperance,
cruelty, war, superstition, greed, and so on to our
advantage. Yet there also is power going to waste
or misdirected. There is a light under the feet of
these things also. Trade, out of which has come
greed, has opened up and humanized the world;
war has often grafted a superior stock upon an in
ferior.

“Tt was for Beauty that the world was made.”
Emerson quotes this verse from Ben Jonson and,
says that it 1s better than any single line of Tenny-
son’s “In Memoriam.” Only the poet is allowed to
make such extravagant statements. We cannot in
soberness and truth say that the world was made
for any particular end, It is out of a certain har-
mony of the elements that we arose and our sense
of beauty was developed, but the world exists for
as many ends as we have power to conceive. Order,
harmony, rhythm, compensation, equilibrium, cir-
cles, spheres, are fundamental in nature. Music,
which is beauty to the ear, hath power over inert
matter. In the Mammoth Cave the very rocks will
sing if you speak to them in the right key. How

76

THE GOOD DEVILS

steel filings on a metal surface will dance and ar-
range themselves in symmetrical groups under the
influence of musical chords! Harmony is at the
heart of nature, but, in the music of creation, dis-
harmony plays a part also. The world is not all
beautiful unless seen as a whole; all its discords
are harmonized in the curve of the sphere. Emer-
son’s own line, “‘Beauty is its own excuse for being,”
is better and truer than the one he quotes from
Ben Jonson.

When saying that in the music of creation dishar-
mony plays a part also, I do not mean to imply that
this is not also true in human music. The dissonances
are just as much a part of great music as are the
harmonies. What would the operas of Wagner be
without the tremendous dissonances? That is what
makes Wagner one of the greatest in music; he
sees things whole, just as Whitman does in his art
— sees that ‘all are but parts of one stupendous
whole,” and that the merely pretty m music, in
poetry, in any art, as in nature, is only one little
phase of it, only an arc of the great circle.

It

Waar trouble we get into when we identify God

with Nature! and what trouble we get into when we

refuse to identify the two! In the first case we

reach the unity that the mind craves, but it is a

unity made up of those antagonisms which revolt
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

us. In the second case it is a duality that leaves
half of the world to the Devil.

We select what we call the divine and stand con-
fused and abashed before the residue. We must
either change our notion about the power we call
God and make it all-inclusive, embracing evil as
well as good, or else we must change our notion
about Nature and see no evil in her. God and Nature
are one. If they are two, who or what is the second?
| How can we fail to see that all the shaded part
of the picture is necessary to the picture — that all
high lights would not make a picture, but only a
daub; and that all that we call good would not make
a world in which men could live and develop? Life
goes on under conditions more or less antagonistic.
The antagonism gives the power; the friction de-
velops electricity. The vices and crimes and follies
and excesses of society are the riot and overflow of
the virtues. The pride of the rich, the tyranny of
power, the lust of gain, the riot of sensuality, are
all a little too much of a good thing — a little too
much heat or light or rain or frost or snow or food
or drink. There can be no perversions till there is
something good to pervert, no counterfeits till there
is first the genuine article.

The currents of wild life get out of their banks
and we have, for example, a plague of locusts or
moths or forest worms, but the natural check surely
comes. The military spirit of Germany, which

18

THE GOOD DEVILS

springs from a laudable devotion to the state and to
the good of all, got out of its banks and brought on
the World War, but the flood has subsided and will
probably be so dyked that it can never get out
again. It will find its outlet in the arts of peace.

IV

Tue so-called laws of Nature were not designed
and decreed as our human laws are. There is no
great lawgiver. Her laws are a sequence of events
and activities; this sequence has worked itself out
through countless ages. Nothing in the universe
was designed in the human sense: it was not first
a thought in some one’s mind, then to become an
act or a contrivance. This concept does not ex-
press the mystery of creation. There is a constant
becoming; there was no beginning, there can be
no ending. There is perpetual change and revolu-
tion, perpetual transfer and promotion, but noth-
ing that can be explained in terms of our human
experience and achievement. The world and all it
holds were created as the flower is created in the
spring, as the snowflake is created in the winter, as
the cloud is created in the summer sky. Man was
created as the chick is created in the egg. Man has
had a long day of creation; he has been becoming
man since the first dawn of life in the old Palzeozoic
seas. His horse and his dog have been becoming
what we behold them through all the geologic
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

ages. This view does not leave the Eternal out of
the universe; it puts Him in it so that He cannot be
got out. It makes Him immanent in it at all points;
it makes Nature transcend humanreasonand human
speech. As long as we think of God as a kind of
superman external to nature, we can deny Him and
cut Him out, but when we identify ourselves and all
things else with Him, there is no escaping Him. We
ourselves are a phase or a fraction of Him. When
we select or screen out what we name the good, the
fair, the divine, and call that God, what are we to do
with the residue? Call it the Devil? The Devil, too,
then is a part of the Eternal Good. I want no emas-
culated universe. I want the fiber and virility and
pungency and power and heat and drive which all
that we call bad gives it.

Our mission is to tame and elevate and direct the
elements and forces without weakening them.
Thence comes our power. A perfect world would
not be one without sin or suffering or struggle or
failure. There can be no perfect world. But there
can be one more and more livable, more and more
in harmony with those laws that promote our well-
being. Approximations, approximations — that is
our success, and never complete fulfillment! When
we say that God is the All, we must have the cour-
age of our convictions and not flinch at the con-
sequences. He is all that we call bad as well as all
that we call good. What we call good is our good,

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THE GOOD DEVILS

and not absolute good. There is no absolute good
any more than there is absolute heat or cold or
height or depth.

We work our way through the mazes and contra-
dictions of things — contradictions from our point
of view — as best we can, eliminating the bad and
cleaving unto the good, but the total scheme of
things, the reconciliations and compensations and
final results, we can never grasp. We cannot abate
our war upon evil, because we have our well-being
on these terms, but evil is indirectly the father of
good.

V

Aut religious and ethical systems grow out of our
egoism. We plant. ourselves in the middle of the
universe and say it is all for us. We make gods in
our, own image, we invent a heaven for the good and
a hell for the wicked, and seek to keep down the
brute within us by a system of rewards and punish-
ments. We improve our minds and souls as we im-
prove the fields; we make them more fair and fertile,
but we do not eliminate Nature; with her own
weapons we improve our relations to her — we pro-
mote our good, but we are still Nature’s; the harvest
we reap is still Nature’s. Qur improvements upon
her are mere removal of obstructions from the rill
that gushes perennially from her prolific earth. We
improve her fruits, her flowers, her animals — that
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

is, make them more serviceable to us — by means
of the hold we have upon her methods. We add
nothing; we utilize what she has placed within our
reach. All of which means that we are Nature’s,
and that our knowing it and thinking of it cannot
make the slightest difference. Our fate is inevitable.
There is no escape. Whose else could we be? We
cannot get off the sphere; if we could, we should
still be a part of the All. Our elaborate schemes to
appropriate or propitiate the Eternal, to stand well
with Him, to gain heaven and avoid hell, are de-
vices of cunning Nature to spur us on the road of
development. (How easily one falls into the lan-
guage of extreme anthropomorphism!) The beau-
tiful myth of the Garden of Eden and the fall of
man is full of meaning. Surely it was a good devil
that put man in the way of knowing good from evil,
and led to his expulsion from a state of innocent
impotence.

Nature’s dealings with man and with the other
forms of life are on the same plan as her dealings
with the earth as a whole. The drainage system of
the globe is by no means perfect; there are marshes
and stagnant waters in every country, but how small
comparatively the area they cover! The rains and
snows give birth to pure springs in all lands, which
unite to form the creeks, which, again, unite to form
the rivers, which flow into the lakes and seas, giving
back to the great bodies of water what the sun and

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THE GOOD DEVILS

the winds took from them, and thus keeping the
vital currents of the globe in ceaseless motion. The
same may be said of the weather system of the
globe; it is not perfect everywhere — too much
rain here, too much sun there, too hot in some parts,
too cold in others, but on the whole favoring life and
development.

We think we could improve the weather. So we
might for our special purposes at times — when it
rains and we have hay down, or a crop to put in, or
a picnic in view; but it is better on the whole that
we adapt ourselves to the weather than that the
weather be adapted to the special needs of each of
us. The Lord would be pretty sure to get mixed up
if He tried the latter plan.

A general and not a special Providence is our sal-
vation. Good and evil mixed make life, as cloud and
sun in due proportions make the best climate.

vi
War is a scourge like fire, the whirlwind, the
earthquake, when viewed in the light of a particular
time and people, but good may come from it after
the lapse of ages. It strengthens and consolidates
and develops the heroic virtues. Yet what a legacy
of suffering and death go with it! But to invoke
war is like invoking the pestilence, the tornado, the
earthquake. The guilt of the German military staff
in bringing on the World War is of the blackest dye.

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

It may be a good to man, but it is a terrible evil to
men. We cannot afford to play Providence; we must
not play with Jove’s thunderbolts, War cannot come
to any people unless somebody (or some body of
men) wills it, and to will an aggressive war is a
crime. No matter if the recent war puts.a final end
to war, the gods will not credit us with the good that
flows from our act over and above our purpose and
will.

All the good that comes from war comes from
struggle, self-denial, heroism; and all courses of
action that develop these traits are substitutes for
war. The farm, the mining-camp, engineering, eX-
ploration, are substitutes. The best war material is
recruited from these fields. The man who can guide
the plowshare can wield the sword; the man who
can face the grizzly and the lion ¢an face the cannon
and the torpedo. War develops no new virtues ; it
helps rejuvenate the old; obedience, team-work,
system, organization and so on are achievements
of an industrial age. In history most wrongs are
finally righted and the balance is fairly kept, but
this is not by the will and purpose of the actors, but
by the remedial forces of nature and life.

The guilt falls the same upon the greed and lust
of power, even if the gods finally reap a harvest that
man’s iniquities have sown. He maketh the wicked
to praise Him, but the wicked are to get no credit.
Here is where our moral standards diverge from

S34 ;

THE GOOD DEVILS

those of the natural universal. Our moral standards
apply to us alone; they are special and limited. The
gods know them not. The rain falls alike upon the
just and upon the unjust. The poet says, “I
judge not as the judge judges, but as the sunlight
falling around a helpless thing.” This is the voice
of the natural universal, When we judge as the
judge judges, we condemn strife and war and all
such uncharity, we execute or imprison criminals, we
found asylums and hospitals and other charitable
organizations; when wé judge as Nature or the poet
judges, we say to the fallen one:

“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, |
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to

rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle
for you.”

The All brings mercy out of cruelty, love out of
hatred, life out of death, but man’s orbit is so small
that he cannot harmonize these contradictions. The
curve of the universal laws does not bring him
round till generations have passed. To keep on
traveling east till you approach your point of de-
parture from the west, you must have the round
globe to travel on. An empire would not avail.

vil
Goop and evil are strangely mixed in this world,
and probably in all other worlds. What is evil to
one creature is often good to another. It is an evil
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

to the vireo or to the warbler when the cowbird lays
its egg in the nest of one of these birds, but it is a
good to the cowbird. It relieves her of all maternal
cares, and provides her young with a devoted
nurse and stepmother, but the young warblers or
vireos are likely to perish. All parasites live at the
expense of some other form of life, and are to that
extent evils to these forms; but Nature is just as
much interested in one form as in the other; an ill
wind to one blows good to another, and thus the
balance is kept.

A world without evil would be an impossible
world — as impossible as mechanical motion with-
out friction or as sunlight without shadow. The two
worlds, the organic and the inorganic, constantly
interact. The former draws all its elements and its
power from the latter, which is passive to it, and
goes its way in the inexorable round of physical
laws, irrespective of it. Viewed as a whole, the evils
of life inhere in its elements and conditions. Air,
water, fire, soil, give us our strength and our growth;
they also destroy us if we fail to keep right rela-
tions to them. We cannot walk or lift a hand
without gravity; and yet, give gravity a chance,
and it crushes us, the floods drown us, fire consumes
us! Could we have life on any other terms; could
God himself annul these conditions?

Hunger is or may become an evil destroying life,
but does it not imply the opposite condition of good

86

THE GOOD DEVILS

— food, an appetite, power of assimilation in the
organism? Disease is an evil to the living body it
attacks, but it does not attack a dead body and it
often educates the body to resist disease. It is a
war which may leave the victor more capable than
he was before.

Robert Ingersoll conceived of an improvement
in creation — “‘make health contagious instead of
disease.’ But this is to trifle with words. In a cer-
tain sense health is contagious. But physical health,
like peace of mind, is a condition, and must come
from harmony within, while a contagious disease is
conveyed by a living micro-organism, and is truly
catching, and to change or reverse all this would be
to destroy the conditions of life itself. To postulate
a world in which two and two would make five, or in
which a straight line is not the shortest distance be-
tween two points, is to take the road to the insane
asylum. Evil is positive only in the sense that
shadow or darkness is positive, or that cold is
positive. It is a greater or lesser degree of negation.

In society and in the state we seek to curb or to
correct or to eliminate Nature’s errors, and in doing
so often fall into other errors and cross-purposes.
Yet to fight what we call evil, and promote what we
eall good, is the supreme duty of all men. Physical
evil the doctors and natural philosophers warn us
against; moral evil, which is a much more intangible
thing, our ethical teachers point out to us; mental

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

evil, ignorance, superstition, false judgment, and so
on, the schools and colleges help us to avoid; re-
ligious evil, economic evil, political evil, all have
their safeguards and guides.

Why could not a world have been made in which
there was no evil? In asking such a question we
misapprehend the nature of the world; we are think-
ing of something made and a maker external to it;
we are trying the universe by the standards of our
human experience. The world was not made, man
was not created in any sense paralleled by our hu-
man experience with tangible bodies. The world and
all there is in it is the result of evolution, or an end-
less process of creation, an everlasting becoming, in
which the nature of things beyond which we can
take no step plays the principal part. A world on
any other terms would not be the world to which we
are adjusted, and out of whose conflicting forces our
lives came.

There will be times when the light will blind the
eye; other times when the darkness will heal and
restore it; when the heat will burn the hand, when
the food will poison the stomach, when the friend
will weary you, when home is a prison, when books
are a bore. Our relations to things: make them good
or bad: our momentary and accidental relations
may make the good things bad, but our permanent
natural relations make the good good, the bad bad.

In a world without the gravity which so often

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THE GOOD DEVILS

crushes us, we could not walk or lift the hand;
without the friction which so often impedes us, our
train and vehicles would not move; without the
water that could so easily drown us, the currents of
our bodies would dry up; without the germs that so
often make war upon us, we should soon cease to be.
Both friendly and hostile are the powers that sur-
round us, — or, rather, is the power that surrounds
us, for it is one and not two, —friendly when we are
in the relation to it demanded and provided for by
our constitution, and unfriendly when we are in
false relation to it. ‘To know this true relation from
the false is a part of the discipline of life.

I know this is not the end of the story; there are
more questions to be asked. We want a solution of
the last solution, but this can never come. Final
questions return forever to themselves; they baffle
us, constituted as our minds are; they are circles
and not lines.

VI
THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

I

HAT unthinking people call design in nature

is simply the reflection of our inevitable an-
thropomorphism. Whatever they can use, they
think was designed for that purpose — the air to
breathe, the water to drink, the soil to plant. It is as
if they thought the notch in the mountains was
made for the road to pass over, or the bays and har-
bor for the use of cities and shipping. But in inor-
ganic nature the foot is made to fit the shoe and not
the reverse. We are cast in the mould of the environ-
ment. If the black cap of the nuthatch which comes
to the maple-tree in front of my window and feeds
on the suet I place there were a human thinking-
cap, the bird would see design in the regular re-
newal of that bit of suet; he would say, ““Some one
or something puts that there for me”’; but he helps
himself and asks no questions. The mystery does
not trouble him. Why should not I, poor mortal,
feel the same about these blessings and conveniences
around me of which I hourly partake, and which
seem so providential? Why do not I, with my think-
ing-cap, infer that some one or something is think-
ing about me and my well-being? The mass of man-

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

kind does draw this inference, and it is well for
them to do so. But the case of the bird is different.
The bit of suet that I feed on is not so conspicuously
something extra, something added to the tree; it
is a part of the tree; it is inseparable from it. I am
compelled, as it were, to distil it out of the tree, so
that instead of being the act of a special providence,
it is the inevitable benefaction of the general provi-
dence of nature. What the old maple holds for me is
maple-sugar, but it was not put there for me; it is
there just the same, whether I want it or not; it is «
part of the economy of the tree; it is a factor in its
own growth; the tree is not thinking of me (pardon
the term), but of itself. Of course this does not make
my debt to it, and my grounds for thankfulness, any
the less real, but it takes it out of the category of
events such as that which brings the suet to the nut-
hatch. The Natural Providence is not intermittent,
it is perennial; but it takes no thought of me or you.
It is life that is flexible and adaptive, and not matter
and force. “We do not,” says Renan, “‘remark in
the universe any sign of deliberate and thoughtful
action. We may affirm that no action of this sort has
existed for millions of centuries.”’ I think we may
affirm more than that — we may affirm that it
never existed. Some vestige of the old theology still
clung to Renan’s mind — there was a day of crea-
tion in which God set the universe going, and then
left it to run itself; the same vestige clung to Dar-
91

\

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

win’s mind and led him to say that in the beginning
God must have created a few species of animals and
vegetables and then left them to develop and popu-
late the world.

Says Renan, “When a chemist arranges an ex-
periment that is to last for years, everything which
takes place in his retort is regulated by the laws of
absolute unconsciousness; which does not mean that
a will has not intervened at the beginning of the ex-
periment, and that it will not intervene at the end.”
There was no beginning nor will there be any ending
to the experiment of creation; the will is as truly
there in the behavior of the molecules at one time as
at another. The effect of Renan’s priestly training
and associations clings to him like a birthmark.

In discussing these questions our plumb-line does
not touch bottom, because there is no bottom. “In
the infinite,” says Renan with deeper insight, “‘ne-
gations vanish, contradictions are merged”; in
other words, opposites are true. Where I stand on
the surface of the sphere is the center of that sur-
face, but that does not prevent the point where you
stand being the center also. Every point is a center,
and the sky is overhead at one place as at another; »
opposites are true.

The moral and intellectual worlds present the
same contradictions or limitations— the same
relatively of what we call truth.

Nature’s ways — which with me is the same as say-

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

ing God’s ways—are so different from ours; “‘no de-
liberate and thoughtful action,” as Renan puts it,
no economy of time or material, no short cuts, no
cutting-out of non-essentials, no definite plan, no
specific ends, few straight lines or right angles; her
streams loiter and curve, her forces are unbridled;
no loss or gain; her accounts always balance; the
loss at one point, or with one form, is a gain with
some other — all of which is the same as saying that
there is nothing artificial in Nature. Allis Natural, all
is subject to the hit-and-miss method. The way Na-
ture trims her trees, plants her forests, sows her gar-
dens, is typical of the whole process of the cosmos.
God is no better than man because man is a part of
God. From our human point of view he is guilty
of our excesses and shortcomings. Time does not
count, pain does not count, waste does not count.
The wonder is that the forests all get planted by
this method, the pines in their places, the spruces in
theirs, the oaks and maples in theirs; and the trees
get trimmed in due time, now and then, it is true, by
a very wasteful method. A tree doctor could save
and prolong the lives of many of them. The small
fountains and streams all find their way to larger
streams, and these to still larger, and these to lakes
or to the sea, and the drainage system of the con-
tinents works itself out with engineering exacti-
tude. The decay of the rocks and the formation of
the soil come about in due time, but not in man’s
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

time. In all the grand processes and transforma-
tions of nature the element of time enters on such
a scale as to dwarf all human efforts.

II

WHEN we say of a thing or an event that it was a
chance happening, we do not mean that it was not
determined by the laws of matter and force, but we
mean it was not the result of the human will, or of
anything like it; it was not planned or designed by
conscious intelligence. Chance in this sense plays a
very large part in nature and in life. Though the re-
sult of irrefragable laws, the whole non-living world
about us shows no purpose or forethought in our
human sense. For instance, we are compelled to
regard the main features of the earth as matters
of chance, the distribution of land and water, of
islands and continents, of rivers, lakes, seas, moun-
tains and plains, valleys and hills, the shapes of the
continents; that there is more land in the northern
hemisphere than in the southern, more land at the
South Pole than at the North, is a matter of chance.
The serpentine course of a stream through an allu-
vial plain, a stream two yards wide, winding and
ox-bowing precisely as does the Mississippi, is a
matter of chance. The whole geography of a coun-
try, in fact, is purely a matter of chance, and not
the result of anything like human forethought. The
planets themselves — that Jupiter is large and
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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

Mercury small; that Saturn has rings; that Jupiter
has seven moons; that the Earth has one; that other
planets have none; that some of the planets are in a
condition to sustain life as we know it, for example,
Venus, Earth, and probably Mars; that some re-
volve in more elliptical orbits than others; that
Mercury and Venus apparently always keep the
same side toward the sun — all these things are mat-
ters of chance. It is easy to say, as did our fathers,
that God designed it thus and so, but how are we
to think of an omnipotent and omniscient Being
as planning such wholesale destruction of his own
works as occurs in the cosmic catastrophes which
the astronomers now and then witness in the side-
real universe, or even as occur on the earth, when
earthquakes and volcanoes devastate fair lands or
engulf the islands of the sea? Why should such a
Being design a desert, or invent a tornado, or ordain
that some portion of the earth’s surface should have
almost perpetual rain and another portion almost
perpetual drought? In Hawaii I saw islands that
were green and fertile on one end from daily show-
ers, while the other end, ten miles away, was a
rough barren rock, from the entire absence of
showers. Were the trade winds designed to bring
the vapors of the sea to the tropic lands?

In following this line of thought we, of course,
soon get where no step can be taken. Is the universe
itself a chance happening? Such a proposition is un-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

thinkable, because something out of nothing is un-
thinkable. Our experience in this world develops our
conceptions of time and space, and to set bounds to
either is an impossible task. We say the cosmos
must always have existed, and there we stop. We
have no faculties to deal with the great ultimate
problems.

We are no better off when we turn to the world of
living things. Here we see design, particular means
adapted to specific ends. Shall we say that a bird or
a bee or a flower is a chance happening, as is the
rainbow or the sunset cloud or a pearl or a precious
stone? Is man himself a chance happening? Here we
are stuck and cannot lift our feet. The mystery and
the miracle of vitality, as Tyndall called it, is before
us. Here is the long, hard road of evolution, the push
and the unfolding of life through countless ages,
something more than the mechanical and the acci-
dental, though these have played a part; something
less than specific plan and purpose, though we seem
to catch dim outlines of these.

Spontaneous variations, original adaptations, a
never-failing primal push toward higher and more
complex forms — how can we, how shall we, read
the riddle of it all? How shall we account for man on
purely naturalistic grounds?

The consistent exponent of variation cannot go
into partnership with supernaturalism. Grant that
the organic split off from the inorganic by insensible

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

degrees, yet we are bound to ask what made it split
off at all? — and how it was that the first unicellu-
lar life contained the promise and the potency of all
the life of to-day? Such questions take us into deep
waters where our plummet-line finds no bottom. It
suits my reason better to say there is no solution
than to accept a solution which itself needs solution,
and still leaves us where we began.

The adjustment: of non-living bodies to each
other seems a simple matter, but in considering the
adaptations of living bodies to one another, and to
their environment, we are confronted with a much
harder problem. Life is an active principle, not in
the sense that gravity and chemical reactions are
active principles, but in a quite different sense.
Gravity and chemical reactions are always the
same, inflexible and uncompromising; but life is
ever variable and adaptive; it will take half a loaf if
it cannot get a whole one. Gravity answers yea and
nay. Life says, “‘Probably; we will see about it; we
will try again to-morrow.” The oak-leaf will become
an oak-ball to accommodate an insect that wants a
cradle and a nursery for its young; it will develop
one kind of a nursery for one insect and another
kind for a different insect.

tir
As far as I have got, or ever hope to get, toward
solving the problem of the universe is to see clearly
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

that it is insoluble. One can arrive only at negative
conclusions; he comes to see that the problem can-
not be dealt with in terms of our human experi-
ence and knowledge. But what other terms have
we? Our knowledge does not qualify us in any de-
gree to deal with the Infinite. The sphere has no
handle to take hold of, and the Infinite baffles the
mind in the same way. Measured by our human
standards, it is a series of contradictions. The
method of Nature is a haphazard method, yet be-
hold the final order and completeness! How many
of her seeds she trusts to the winds and the waters,
and her fertilizing pollens and germs also! And the
winds and the waters do her errands, with many
failures, of course, but they hit the mark often
enough to serve her purpose. She provides lavishly
enough to afford her failures.

When we venture upon the winds and the waters
with our crafts, we aim to control them, and we
reach our havens only when we do control them.

What is there in the method of Nature that an-
swers to the human will in such matters? Nothing
that I can see; yet her boats and her balloons reach
their havens — not all of them, but enough of them
for her purpose. Yet when we apply the word “pur-
pose” or “design” to Nature, to the Infinite, we
are describing her in terms of the finite, and thus fall
into contradictions. Still, the wings and balloons
and hooks and springs in the vegetable world are for

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

a specific purpose — to scatter the seed far from the
parent plant. Every part and organ and movement
of a living body serves a purpose to that organ-
ism. The mountain lily looks straight up to the
sky; the meadow lily looks down to the earth; un-
doubtedly each flower finds its advantage in its own
attitude, but what that advantage is, I know not.
If Nature planned and invented as man does, she
would attain to mere unity and simplicity. It is her
blind, prodigal, haphazard methods that result in
her endless diversity. When she got a good wing for
‘the seed of a tree, such as that of the maple, she
would, if merely efficient, give this to the seeds of
other similar trees; but she gives a different wing
to the ash, to the linden, to the elm, the pine, and
the hemlock, while to some she gives no wings at
all. The nut-bearing trees, such as the oaks, the
beeches, the walnuts, and the hickories, have no
wings, except such as are afforded them by the
birds and beasts that feed upon them and carry
them away. And here again Nature has a pur-
pose in the edible nut which tempts some creatures
to carry it away. If all the nuts were devoured,
the whole tribe of nut-bearing trees would in time
be exterminated, and Nature’s end defeated. But
in a world of conflicting forces like ours, chance
plays an important part; many of the nuts get
scattered, and not all devoured. The hoarding-up
propensities of certain birds and squirrels result
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

in the planting of many oaks and chestnuts and
beeches.

The inherent tendency to variation in organic
life, together with Nature’s hit-and-miss method,
account for her endless variety on the same plane,
as it were, as that of her many devices for dissemi-
nating her seeds. One plan of hook or barb serves as
well as another, —that of bidens as well as that of
hound’s-tongue,—yet each has a pattern of its
own. The same may be said of the leaves of the
trees: their function is to expose the juices of the
tree to the chemical action of light and air; yet
behold what an endless variety in their shape,
size, and structure! This is the way of the Infi-
nite — to multiply endlessly, to give a free rein to
the physical forces and let them struggle with one
another for the stable equilibrium to which they
never, as a whole, attain; to give the same free rein
to the organic forces and let their various forms
struggle with one another for the unstable equilib-
rium which is the secret of their life.

The many contingencies that wait upon the cir-
cuit of the physical forces and determine the various
forms of organic matter — rocks, sand, soil, gravel,
mountain, plain — all shifting and changing end-
lessly — wait upon the circuit of the organic forces
and turn the life impulse into myriad channels, and
people the earth with myriads of living forms, each
accidental from our limited point of view, while all

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

are determined by irrefragable laws. The contra-
dictions in such statements are obvious and are in-
evitable when the finite tries to measure or describe
the ways of the Infinite.

The waters of the globe are forever seeking the
repose of a dead level, but when they attain it, if
they ever do, the world will be dead. Behold what a
career they have in their circuit from the sea to the
clouds and back to the earth in the ministering
rains, and then to the sea again through the streams
and rivers! The mantling snow with its exquisite
crystals, the grinding and transporting glaciers, the
placid or plowing and turbulent rivers, the spark-
ling and refreshing streams, the cooling and renew-
ing dews, the softening and protecting vapors, wait
upon this circuit of the waters through the agency
of the sun, from the sea, through the sky and land,
back to the sea again. Yes, and all the myriad forms
of life also. This circuit of the waters drives and sus-
tains all the vital machinery of the globe.

Why and how the sun and the rain bring the
rose and the violet, the peach and the plum, the
wheat and the rye, and the boys and the girls, out
of the same elements and conditions that they
bring the thistles and the tares, the thorn and the
scrub, the fang and the sting, the monkey and the
reptile, is the insoluble mystery.

If Nature aspires toward what we call the good in
man, does she not equally aspire toward what we

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call the bad in thorns and weeds and reptiles? May
we not say that good is our good, and bad is our
bad, and that there is, and can be, no absolute good
and no absolute bad, any more than there can be
an absolute up or an absolute down?

How haphazard, how fortuitous and uncalculated
is all this business of the multiplication of the hu-
man race! What freaks, what failures, what mon-
strosities, what empty vessels, what deformed
limbs, what defective brains, what perverted in-
stincts! It is as if in the counsels of the Eternal it
had been decided to set going an evolutionary im-
pulse that should inevitably result in man, and then
leave him to fail or flourish just as the ten thousand
contingencies of the maelstrom of conflicting earth
forces should decide, so that whether a man be-
come a cripple or an athlete, a fool or a philoso-
pher, a satyr or a god, is largely a matter of chance.
Yet the human brain has steadily grown in size, hu-
man mastery over nature has steadily increased, and
chance has, upon the whole, brought more good to
man than evil. Optimism is a final trait of the Eter-
nal.

And the taking-off of man, how haphazard, how
fortuitous it all is! His years shall be threescore and
ten; but how few, comparatively, reach that age,
how few live out half their days! Disease, accident,
stupidity, superstition, cut him off at all ages — in
infancy, in childhood, in youth, in manhood; his

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whole life is a part of the flux and uncertainty of
things. No god watches over him aside from himself
and his kind, no atom or molecule is partial to him,
gravity crushes him, fire burns him, the floods
drown him as readily as they do vipers and vermin.
He takes his chances, he gains, and he loses, but
Nature treats him with the same impartiality that
she treats the rest of her creatures. He runs the same
gantlet of the hostile physical forces, he pays the
same price for his development; but his greater
capacity for development — to whom or what does
he owe that? If we follow Darwin we shall say natu-
ral selection, and natural selection is just as good a
god as any other. No matter what we call it, if it
brought man to the head of creation and put all
things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough
for anybody. At the heart of it there is still a mys-
tery we cannot grasp. The ways of Nature about us
are no less divine because they are near and famil-
iar. The illusion of the rare and the remote, science
dispels. Of course we are still trying to describe the
Infinite in terms of the finite.

IV

WE are so attached to our kind, and so dependent

upon them, that most persons feel homeless and

orphaned in a universe where no suggestion of sym-

pathy and interest akin to our own comes to us

from the great void. A providence of impersonal
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

forces, the broadcast, indiscriminate benefits of na-
ture, kind deeds where no thought of kindness is,
well-being as the result of immutable law— all such ©
ideas chill and disquiet us, until we have inured our-
selves to them. We love to fancy that we see friendly
hands and hear friendly voices in nature. It is easy
to make ourselves believe that the rains, the
warmth, the fruitful seasons, are sent by some Be-
ing for our especial benefit. The thought that we are
adapted to nature and not nature made or modified
to suit us, is distasteful to us. It rubs us the wrong
way. We have long been taught to believe that
there is air because we have lungs, and water be-
cause we need it to drink, and light because we
need it to see. Science takes this conceit out of us.
The light begat the eye, and. the air begat the lungs.

In the universe, as science reveals it to us, sensi-
tive souls experience the cosmic chill; in the uni-
verse as our inevitable anthropomorphism shapes it
for us, we experience the human glow. The same
anthropomorphism has in the past peopled the
woods and fields and streams and winds with good
and evil spirits, and filled the world with cruel and
debasing superstitions; but in our day we have got
rid of all of this; we have abolished all gods but one.
This one we still fear, and bow down before, and
seck to propitiate — not with offerings and sacri-
fices, but with good Sunday clothes and creeds and
pew-rents and praise and incense and surplices and

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

ceremonies. What Brocken shadows our intense
personalism casts upon nature! We see the gigantic
outlines of our own forms, and mistake them for a
veritable god. But as we ourselves are a part of na-
ture, so this humanizing tendency of ours is also a
part of nature, a part of human nature — not valid
and independent, like the chemical and _ physical
forces, but as valid and real as our dreams, our
ideas, our aspirations. All the gods and divinities
and spirits with which man has peopled the heavens
and the earth are a part of Nature as she manifests
herself in our subjective selves. So there we are, on a
trail that ends where it began. We condemn one
phase of nature through another phase of nature
that is active in our own minds. How shall we escape
this self-contradiction? As we check or control the
gravity without us by the power of the gravity in
our own bodies, so our intelligence must sit in judg-
ment on phases of the same Universal Intelligence
manifested in outward nature.

It is this recognition of an intelligence in nature
akin to our own that gives rise to our anthropomor-
phism. We recognize in the living world about us
the use of specific means to specific ends, and this
we call intelligence. It differs from our own in that
it is not selective and intensive in the same way. It
does not take short cuts; it does not aim at human
efficiency; it does not cut out waste and delay and
pain. It is the method of trial and error. It hits its

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mark because it hits all marks. Species succeed be-
cause the tide that bears them on is a universal tide.
It is not a river, but an ocean current. Nature pro-
gresses, but not as man does by discarding one form
and adapting a higher. She discards nothing; she
keeps all her old forms and ways and out of them
evolves the higher; she keeps the fish’s fin, while she
perfects the bird’s wing; she preserves the inver-
tebrate, while she fashions the vertebrate; she
achieves man, while she preserves the monkey. She
gropes her way like a blind man, but she arrives be-
cause all goals are hers. Perceptive intelligence she
has given in varying degrees to all creatures, but
reasoning intelligence she has given to man alone. I
say “given,” after our human manner of speaking,
when I mean “‘achieve.” There is no giving in Na-
ture — there is effort and development. There is in-
terchange and interaction, but no free gifts. Things
are bought with a price. The price of the mind of
man — who can estimate what it has been through
the biological and geological ages? — a price which
his long line of antecedent forms has paid in strug-
gle and suffering and death. The little that has been
added to the size of his brain since the Piltdown
man and the Neanderthal man — what effort and
pain has not that cost? We pay for what we get, or
our forbears paid for it. They paid for the size
of our brains, and we pay for our progress in
knowledge.
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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

V

Tuer term “religion”? is an equivocal and much-
abused word, but I am convinced that no man’s life
is complete without some kind of an emotional ex-
perience that may be called religious. Not necessa-
rily so much a definite creed or belief as an attraction
and aspiration toward the Infinite, or a feeling of
awe and reverence inspired by the contemplation of
this wonderful and mysterious universe, something
to lift a man above purely selfish and material ends,
and open his soul to influences from the highest
heavens of thought.

Religion in some form is as natural to man as are
eating and sleeping. The mysteries of life and the
wonder and terror of the world in which he finds
himself, arouse emotions of awe and fear and wor-
ship in him as soon as his powers of reflection are
born. In man’s early history religion, philosophy,
and literature are one. He worships before he in-
vestigates; he builds temples before he builds
schoolhouses or civic halls. He is, of course, super-
stitious long before he is scientific; he trembles be-
fore the supernatural long before he has mastered
the natural. The mind of early man was synthetic as
our emotions always are; it lumped things, it did
not differentiate and classify. The material progress
of the race has kept pace with man’s power of analy-
sis — the power to separate one thing from another,

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

to resolve things into their component parts and
recombine them to serve his own purposes. He gets
water power, steam power, electric power, by sepa-
rating a part from the whole and placing his ma-
chinery where they tend to unite again.

Science tends more and more to reveal to us the
unity that underlies the diversity of nature. We
must have diversity in our practical lives ; we must
seize Nature by many handles. But our intellectual
lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all
this complexity. Our religious lives demand the
same. Amid all the diversity of creeds and sects we
are coming more and more to see that religion is
one, that verbal differences and ceremonies are
unimportant, and that the fundamental agreements
are alone significant. Religion as a key or passport
to some other world has had its day; as a mere set
of statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery
it has had its day. Science makes us more and more
at home in this world, and 1s coming more and more,
to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value.
Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the
well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of won-
der, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in
the presence of the marvelous universe. It quiets
our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the
troubled waters of our lives, and reconciles us to the
world as it is. The old fickle.and jealous gods be-
gotten by our fears and morbid consciences fall

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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

away, and the new gods of law and order, who deal
justly if mercilessly, take their places.

“The mind of the universe which we share,” is a
phrase of Thoreau’s — a large and sane idea which
shines like a star amid his many firefly conceits and
paradoxes. The physical life of each of us is a part or
rill of the universal life about us, as surely as every
ounce of our strength is a part of gravity. With
equal certainty, and under the same law, our men-
tal lives flow from the fountain of universal mind,
the cosmic intelligence which guides the rootlets of
the smallest plant as it searches the soil for the ele-
ments it needs, and the most minute insect in avail-
ing itself of the things it needs. It is this primal cur-
rent of life, the two different phases of which we see
in our bodies and in our minds, that continues after
our own special embodiments of it have ceased; in
it is the real immortality. The universal mind does
not die, the universal life does not go out. The jewel
that trembles in the dewdrop, the rain that lends
itself to the painting of the prismatic colors of the
bow in the clouds, pass away, but their fountain-—
head in the sea does not pass away. The waters may
make the wonderful circuit through the clouds, the
air, the earth, and the cells and veins of living
things, any number of times —- now a globule of
vapor in the sky, now a starlike crystal in the snow,
now the painted mist of a waterfall, then the limpid
current of a mountain brook — and still the sea re-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

mains unchanged. And though the life and mentality
of the globe passes daily and is daily renewed, the
primal source of those things is as abounding as
ever. It is not you and I that are immortal; it is -
Creative Energy, of which we are a part. Our im-
mortality is swallowed up in this.

The poets, the prophets, the martyrs, the heroes,
the saints — where are they? Each was but a jewel
in the dew, the rain, the snowflake — throbbing,
burning, flashing with color for a brief time and
then vanishing, adorning the world for a moment
and then caught away into the great abyss. “O
spendthrift Nature!” our hearts cry out; but Na-
ture’s spending is only the ceaseless merging of one
form into another without diminution of her mate-
rial or blurring of her types. Flowers bloom and flow-
ers fade, the seasons come and the seasons go, men
are born and men die, the world mourns for its
saints and heroes, its poets and saviors, but Nature
remains and is as young and spontaneous and inex-
haustible as ever. Where is the comfort in all this
to you and to me? There is none, save the comfort
- or satisfaction of knowing things as they are. We
shall feel more at ease in Zion when we learn to dis-
tinguish substance from shadow, and to grasp the
true significance of the world of which we form a
part. In the end each of us will have had his day,
and can say as Whitman does,

“T have positively appeared. That is enough.’
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THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE

In us or through us the Primal Mind will have con-
templated and enjoyed its own works and will con-
tinue to do so as long as human life endures on this
planet. It will have achieved the miracle of the In.
carnation, and have tasted the sweet and the bitter,
the victories and the defeats of evolution. The leg-
end of the birth and life of Jesus is but this ever-
present naturalism written large with parable and
miracle on the pages of our religious history. In the
lives of each of us the supreme reality comes down
to earth and takes on the human form and suffers
all the struggles and pains and humiliations of mor-
tal, finite life. Even the Christian theory of the vi-
carious atonement is not without its basis of natu-
ralism. Men, through disease and ignorance and
half knowledge, store up an experience that saves
future generations from suffering and failure. We
win victories for our descendants, and bring the
kingdom nearer for them by the devils and evil
spirits we overcome.

VII
THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

I

O say that man is as good as God would to most

persons seem like blasphemy; but to say that
man is as good as Nature would disturb no one.
Man is a part of Nature, or a phase of Nature, and
shares in what we call her imperfections. But what
is Nature a part of, or a phase of? — and what or
who is its author? Is it not true that this earth
which is so familiar to us is as good as yonder morn-
ing or evening star and made of the same stuff? —
just as much in the heavens, just as truly a celestial
abode as it is? Venus seems to us like a great jewel
in the crown of night or morning. From Venus the
earth would seem like a still larger jewel. The heav-
ens seem afar off and free from all stains and im-
purities of earth; we lift our eyes and our hearts to
them as to the face of the Eternal, but our science
reveals no body or place there so suitable for human
abode and human happiness as this earth. In fact,
this planet is the only desirable heaven of which we
have any clue. Innumerable other worlds exist in
the abysses of space which may be the abodes of be-
ings superior, and of beings inferior, to ourselves.
We place our gods afar off so as to dehumanize

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THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

them, never suspecting that when we do so we dis-
count their divinity. The more human we are, —
remembering that to err is human,—the nearer
God we are. Of course good and bad are human con-
cepts and are a verdict upon created things as they
stand related to us, promoting or hindering our well-
being. In the councils of the Eternal there is appar-
ently no such distinction.

Man is not only as good as God; some men are a
good deal better, that is, from our point of view;
they attain a degree of excellence of which there is
no hint in nature — moral excellence. It is not until
we treat man as a part of nature — as a product of
the earth as literally as are the trees — that we can
reconcile these contradictions. If we could build up |
a composite man out of all the peoples of the earth,
including even the Prussians, he would represent
fairly well the God in nature.

Communing with God is communing with our
own hearts, our own best selves, not with something
foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have
gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they
took God with them, and the silence and detachment
enabled them to hear the still, small voice of their
own souls, as one hears the ticking of his own watch
in the stillness of the night. We are not cut off, we
are not isolated points; the great currents flow
through us and over us and around us, and unite us
to the whole of nature. Moses saw God in the burn-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

ing bush, saw him with the eyes of early man whose
divinities were clothed in the extraordinary, the
fearful, or the terrible; we see him in the meanest
weed that grows, and hear him in the gentle mur-
mur of our own heart’s blood. The language of de-
votion and religious conviction is only the language
of soberness and truth written large and aflame
with emotion.

Man goes away from home searching for the gods
he carries with him always. Man can know and feel
and love only man. There is a deal of sound psy-
chology in the new religion called Christian Science
— in that part which emphasizes the power of the
mind over the body, and the fact that the world is
largely what we make it, that evil is only the shadow.
of good — old truths reburnished. This helps us to
understand the hold it has taken upon such a large
number of admirable persons. Good and evil are
relative terms, but evil is only the shadow of good.
Disease is a reality, but not in the same sense that
health is a reality. Positive and negative electricity
are both facts, but positive and negative good be-
long to a different order. Christian Science will not
keep the distemper out of the house if the sewer-gas
gets in; inoculation will do more to prevent typhoid
and diphtheria than “declaring the truth” or say-
ing your prayers or counting your beads. In its
therapeutical value experimental science is the only
safe guide in dealing with human corporal ailments.

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THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

We need not fear alienation from God. I feed Him
when I feed a beggar. I serve Him when I serve my
neighbor. I love Him when I love my friend. I praise
Him when I praise the wise and good of any race
or time. I shun Him when I shun the leper. I for-
give Him when I forgive my enemies. I wound Him
when I wound a human being. I forget Him when I
forget my duty to others. If I am cruel or unjust
or resentful or envious or inhospitable toward any
man, woman, or child, I am guilty of all these things
toward God: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto
one of the least of these my brethren, ye have
done it unto me.”

Il

I Am perstiaded that a man without religion falls
short of the proper human ideal. Religion, as I use
the term, is a spiritual flowering, and the man who
has it not is like a plant that never blooms. The
mind that does not open and unfold its religious
sensibilities in the sunshine of this infinite and
spiritual universe, is to be pitied. Men of science do
well enough with no other religion than the love of
truth, for this is indirectly a love of God. The as-
tronomer, the geologist, the biologist, tracing the
footsteps of the Creative Energy throughout the uni-
verse — what need has he of any formal, patent-
right religion? Were not Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall,
and Lyall, and all other seekers and verifiers of
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

natural truth among the most truly religious of
men? Any of these men would have gone to hell for
the truth — not the truth of creeds and rituals, but
the truth as it exists in the councils of the Eternal,
and as it is written in the laws of matter and of life.

For my part I had a thousand times rather have
Huxley’s religion than that of the bishops who
sought to discredit him, or Bruno’s than that of the
church that burnt him. The religion of a man that
has no other aim than his own personal safety from
some real or imaginary future calamity, is of the
selfish, ignoble kind.

Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has hight

religious value. This has saved many persons in this
world — saved them from mammon-worship, and
from the frivolity and insincerity of the crowd. It
has made their lives placid and sweet. It has given
them an inexhaustible field for inquiry, for enjoy-
ment, for the exercise of all their powers, and in the
end has not left them soured and dissatisfied. It has
made them contented and at home wherever they
are in nature — in the house not made with hands.
This house is their church, and the rocks and the
hills are the altars, and the creed is written in the
leaves of the trees and in the flowers of the field and
in the sands of the shore. A new creed every day
and new preachers, and holy days all the week
through. Every walk to the woods is a religious rite,
every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance.
116

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Prd

THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

Communion service is at all hours, and the bread
and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother
Earth. There are no heretics in Nature’s church; all
are believers, all are communicants. The beauty of
natural religion is that you have it all the time; you
do not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends,
in catacombs, in garbled texts, in miracles of dead
saints or wine-bibbing friars. It is of to-day; it is
now and here; it is everywhere. The crickets chirp it,
the birds sing it, the breezes chant it, the thunder
proclaims it, the streams murmur it, the unaffected
man lives it. Its incense rises from the plowed
fields, it is on the morning breeze, it is in the forest
breath and in the spray of the wave. The frosts
write it in exquisite characters, the dews impearl it,
and the rainbow paints it on the cloud. It is not an

insurance policy underwritten by a bishop or a
"priest; it is not even a faith; it is a love, an enthusi-
asm, a consecration to natural truth.

The God of sunshine and of storms speaks a less
_ equivocal language than the God of revelation.

Our fathers had their religion and their fathers
had theirs, but they were not ours, and could not be
in those days and under those conditions. But their
religions lifted them above themselves; they healed
their wounds; they consoled them for many of the
failures and disappointments of this world; they de-
veloped character; they tempered the steel in their
nature. How childish to us seems the plan of salva-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

tion, as our fathers found it in the fervid and,\I
freely say, inspired utterances of Saint Paul! But it
saved them, it built character, it made life serious,
it was an heroic creed which has lost credence in our
more knowing and more frivolous age. We see how
impossible it is, but we do not see the great natural
truths upon which it rests.

A man is not saved by the truth of the things he
believes, but by the truth of his belief — its sincer-
ity, its harmony with his character. ‘The absurdities
of the popular religions do not matter; what matters
is the lukewarm belief, the empty forms, the shal-
low conceptions of life and duty. We are prone to
think that if the creed is false, the religion is false:
Religion is an emotion, an inspiration, a feeling of
the Infinite, and may have its root in any creed or in
no creed. What can be more unphilosophical than
the doctrines of the Christian Scientists? Yet
Christian Science is a good practical religion. It
makes people cheerful; happy, and helpful — yes,
and helps make them healthy too. Its keynote is
love, and love holds the universe together. Any
creed that ennobles character and opens a door or a
window upon the deeper meanings of this marvelous
universe is good enough to live by, and good enough
to die by. The Japanese-Chinese religion of ancestor
worship, sincerely and devoutly held, is better than
the veneer of much of our fashionable well-dressed
religion.

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THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

Guided by. appearances alone, how surely we
should come to look upon the sun as a mere append-
age of the earth! — as much so as is the moon. How
near it seems at sunrise and sunset, and as if these
phenomena directly involved the sun, extending to
it and modifying its light and heat! We do not real-
ize that these are merely terrestrial phenomena,
and that the sun, so to speak, knows them not.

Viewed from the sun the earth is a mere speck in
the sky, and the amount of the total light and heat
from the sun that is received on the earth is so
small that the mind can hardly grasp it. Yet for all
practical purposes the sun shines for us alone. Our
relation to it could not be any more direct and sus-
taining if it were created for that purpose. It is im-
manent in the life of the globe. It is the source of all
our energy and therefore of our life. Its bounties are
universal. The other planets find it is their-sun also.
It is as special and private to them as to us. We
think the sun paints the bow on the cloud, but the
bow follows from the laws of optics. The sun knows
it not.

It is the same with what we call God. His bounty
is of the same universal, impersonal kind, and yet
for all practical purposes it exists especially for us,
it is immanent every moment in our lives. There is
no special Providence. Nature sends the rain upon
the just and the unjust, upon the sea as upon the
land. We are here and find life good because Provi-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

dence is general and not special. The conditions are
not too easy, the struggle has made men of us. The
bitter has tempered the sweet. Evil has put us on
our guard and keeps us so. We pay for what we get.

Il

Tuat wise old Roman, Marcus Aurelius, says,
**Nothing is evil which is according to nature.” At
that moment he is thinking especially of death
which, when it comes in the course of nature, is not
an evil, unless life itself is also an evil. After the
lamp of life is burned out, death is not an evil,
rather is it a good. But premature death, death by
accident or disease, before a man has done his work
or used up his capital of vitality, is an evil. Disease
itself is an evil, but if we lived according to nature
there would be no disease; we should die the natural,
painless death of old age. Of course there is no such
thing as absolute evil or absolute good. Evil is that
which is against our well-being, and good is that
which promotes it. We always postulate the exist-
ence of life when we speak of good and evil. Ex-
cesses in nature are evil to us because they bring
destruction and death in their train. They are dis-
harmonies in the scheme of things, because they
frustrate and bring to naught. The war which Mar-
cus Aurelius was waging when he wrote those pas-
sages was an evil in itself, though good might come
out of it.
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THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

Everything in organic nature — trees, grasses,
flowers, insects, fishes, mammals — is beset by evil
of some kind. The natural order is good because it
brought us here and keeps us here, but evil has al-
ways dogged our footsteps. Leaf-blight is an evil to
the tree, smallpox is an evil to man, frost is an evil
to the insects, flood an evil to the fishes.

Moral evil — hatred, envy, greed, lying, cruelty,
cheating — is of another order. These vices have no
existence below the human sphere. We call them
evils because they are disharmonies; they are inimi-
cal to the highest standard of human happiness and
well-being. They make a man less a man, they work
discord and develop needless friction. Sand in the
engine of your car and water in the gasoline are
evils, and malice and jealousy and selfishness in
your heart are analogous evils.

In our day we read the problem of Nature and
God in a new light, the light of science, or of eman-
cipated human reason, and the old myths mean lit-
tle to us. We accept Nature as we find it, and do not
crave the intervention of a God that sits behind
and is superior to it. The self-activity of the
cosmos suffices. We accept the tornadoes and earth-
quakes and world wars, and do not lose faith. We
arm ourselves against them as best we can. We ac-
cept the bounty of the rain, the sunshine, the soil,
the changing seasons, and the vast armory of non-
living forces, and from them equip or teach our-

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“ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

selves to escape, endure, modify, or ward off the
destructive and non-human forces that beset our
way. We draw our strength from the Nature that
seems and is so regardless of us; our health and
wholeness are its gifts. The biologic ages, with all
their carnival of huge and monstrous forms, had our
well-being at heart. The evils and dangers that be-
set our way have been outmatched by the good and
the helpful. The deep-sea fish would burst and die if
brought to the surface; the surface life would be
crushed and killed in the deep sea. Life adapts itself
to its environment; hard conditions make it hard.
Winds, floods, inclement seasons, have driven it
around the earth; the severer the cold, the thicker
the fur; compensations always abound. If Nature is
not all-wise and all-merciful from our human point
of view, she has placed us in a world where our own
wisdom and mercy can be developed; she has sent
us to a school in which we learn to see her own
shortcomings and imperfections, and to profit by
them. |

The unreasoning, unforeseeing animals suffer
more from the accidents of nature — drought,
flood, lightning — than man does; but man suffers
more from evils of his own making — war, greed,
intemperance, pestilence — so that the develop-
ment in both lines goes on, and life is still at the
flood.

Good and evil are inseparable. We cannot have

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THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

light without shade, or warmth without cold, or life
without death, or development without struggle.
The struggle for life, of which Darwinism makes so
much, is only the struggle of the chick to get out of
the shell, or of the flower to burst its bud, or of the
root to penetrate the soil. It is not the struggle of
battle and hate — the justification of war and usur-
pation — it is for the most part a beneficent strug-
gle with the environment, in which the fittest of the
individual units of a species survive, but in which
the strong and the feeble, the great and the small of
species alike survive. The lamb survives with the
lion, the wren with the eagle, the Esquimo with the
European — all manner of small and delicate forms
survive with the great and robust. One species of
carnivora, or of rodents, or herbivora, does not, as a
rule, exterminate another species. It is true that
Species prey upon species, that cats eat mice, that
hawks eat smaller birds, and that man slays and
eats the domestic animals. Probably man alone has
exterminated species. But outside of man’s doings
all the rest belongs to Nature’s system of checks and
balances, and bears no analogy to human or inhu-
man wars and conquests.

Life struggles with matter, the tree struggles with
the wind and with other trees. Man struggles with
gravity, cold, wet, heat, and all the forces that hin-
der him. The tiniest plant that grows has to force its
root down into the soil; earlier than that it has to

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burst its shell or case. The corn struggles to lift itself
up after the storm has beaten it down; effort, effort,
everywhere in the organic world. Says Whitman:

““Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.”

IV

Every few years we have an ice-storm or a snow-
storm that breaks down and disfigures the trees.
Some trees suffer much more than others. The
storm goes its way; the laws of physical force pre-
vail; the great world of mechanical forces is let loose
upon the small world of vital forces; occasionally a
tree is so crushed that it never entirely recovers;
but after many years the woods and groves have
repaired the damages and taken on their wonted
thrifty appearance. The evil was only temporary;
the world of trees has suffered no permanent set-
back. But had the trees been conscious beings, what
a deal of suffering they would have experienced! An
analogous visitation to human communities entails
a heritage of misery, but in time it too is forgotten
and its scars healed. Fire, blood, war, epidemics,
earthquakes, are such visitations, but the race sur-
vives them and reaps good from them.

We say that Nature cares nothing for the individ-
ual, but only for the race or the species. The whole
organic world is at war with the inorganic, and as in
human wars the individuals are sacrificed that the

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army, the whole, may live; so in the strife and com-
petition of nature, the' separate units fall that the
mass may prosper.

It is probably true that in the course of the bio-
logical history of the earth, whole species have been
rendered extinct by parasites, or by changing out-
ward conditions. But this has been the exception,
and not the rule. The chestnut blight now seems to
threaten the very existence of this species of tree in
this country, but I think the chances are that this
fungus will meet with some natural check.

In early summer comes the June drop of apples.
The trees start with more fruit than they can carry,
and if they are in vigorous health, they will drop
the surplus. It is a striking illustration of Nature’s
methods. The tree does its own thinning. But if not
at the top of its condition, it fails to do this. It takes
health and strength simply to let go; only a living
tree drops its fruit or its leaves; only a growing man
drops his outgrown opinions. |

If we put ourselves in the place of the dropped
apples, we must look upon our fate as unmixed evil.
If we put ourselves in the place of the tree and of
the apples that remain on it, the June drop would
appear an unmixed good — finer fruit, and a health-
ier, longer-lived tree results. Nature does not work
so much to specific as to universal ends. The indi-
vidual may go, but the type must remain. The ranks
may be decimated, but the army and its cause must

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triumph. Life in all its forms is a warfare only in the
sense that it is a struggle with its outward condi-
tions, in which, other things being equal, the strong-
est force prevails. Small and weak forms prevail
also, because the competing forms are small and
weak, or because at the feast of life there is a place
for the small and weak also. But lion against lion,
. man against man, mouse against mouse, the strong-
est will, in the end, be the victor. .

Man’s effort is to save waste, to reduce friction, to
take short cuts, to make smooth the way, to seize
the advantage, to economize time, but the physical
forces know none of these things.

Go into the woods and behold the evil the trees
have to contend with — all typical of the evil we
have to contend with — too crowded in places, one
tree crushing another by its fall, specimens on every
hand whose term of life might be lengthened by a
little wise surgery; borers, blight, disease, insect
pests, storm, wreckage, thunderbolt scars, or de-
struction — evil in a hundred forms besetting every
tree, and sooner or later leaving its mark. A few
escape — oaks, maples, pines, elms — and reach a
greater age than the others, but they fail at last, and
when they have rounded out their green century, or
ten centuries, and go down in a gale, or in the still-
ness of a summer night, how often younger trees are
marred or crushed by their fall! But come back after
many long years, and their places are filled, and all

126

THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

the scars are healed. The new generation of trees
is feeding upon the accumulations of the old. Evil
is turned to good. The destruction of the cyclone,
the ravages of fire, the wreckage of the ice-storm,
are all obliterated and the forest-spirit is rank and
full again.

There is no wholesale exemption from this rule of
waste and struggle in this world, nor probably m any
other. We have life on these terms. The organic
world develops under pressure from within and from
without. Rain brings the perils of rain, fire brings
the perils of fire, power brings the perils of power.
The great laws go our way, but they will break us or
rend us if we fail to keep step with them. Unmixed
good is a dream; unmixed happiness is a dream; per-
fection is a dream; heaven and hell are both dreams
of our mixed and struggling lives, the one the out-
come of our aspirations for the good, the other the
outcome of our fear of evil.

The trees in the woods, the plants in the fields
encounter hostile forces the year through; storms
crash or overthrow them; visible and invisible ene-
mies prey upon them: yet are the fields clothed in
verdure and the hills and plains mantled with su-
perb forests. Nature’s haphazard planting and sow-
ing and her wasteful weeding and trimming do not
result in failure as these methods do with us. A fail-
ure of hers with one form or species results in the
success of some other form. All successes are hers.

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Allow time enough and the forest returns in the
path of the tornado, but maybe with other species of
trees. The birds and squirrels plant oaks and chest-
nuts amid the pines and the winds plant pines amid
the oaks and chestnuts. The robins and the cedar-
birds sow the red cedar broadcast over the land-
scape, and plant the Virginia creeper and the poison-
ivy by every stub and fence-post. The poison-ivy is
a triumph of Nature as truly as is the grapevine or
the morning-glory. All are hers. Man specializes;
he selects this or that, selects the wheat and re-
jects the tares; but Nature generalizes; she has the
artist’s disinterestedness; all is good; all are parts of
her scheme. She nourishes the foul-smelling cat-
brier as carefully as she does the rose. Each creature,
with man at the head, says, “The world is mine; it
was created for me.” Evidently it was created for
all, at least all forms are at home here. Nature’s sys-
tem of checks and balances preserves her working
equilibrium. If a species of forest worm under some
exceptionally favoring conditions gets such a start
that it threatens to destroy our beech and maple
forests, presently a parasite, stimulated by this turn
in its favor, appears and restores the balance. For
two or three seasons the beech-woods in my native
town were ravaged by some kind of worm or beetle;
in midsummer the sunlight came into them as if the
roof had been taken off; later they swarmed with
white millers. But the scourge was suddenly checked
128 ©

THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST

— some parasite, probably a species of ichneumon-
fly, was on hand to curtail the dangerous excess.

I am only trying to say that after we have painted
Nature as black as the case will allow, after we have
depicted her as a savage beast, a devastating storm,
a scorching desert, a consuming fire, an all-engulfing
earthquake, or as war, pestilence, famine, we have
only depicted her from our limited human point of
view. But even from that point of view the favoring
conditions of life are so many, living bodies are so
adaptive, the lift of the evolutionary impulse is so
unconquerable, the elemental laws and forces are so
overwhelmingly on our side, that our position in the
universe is still an enviable one. “Though he slay
me, yet will I trust in him.” Slain, I shall nourish
some other form of life, and the books will still bal-
ance — not my books, but the vast ledgers of the
Eternal.

In the old times we accounted for creation in the
simple terms of the Hebrew Scriptures — “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
We even saw no discrepancy in the tradition that
creation took place in the spring. But when we
attempt to account for creation in the terms of
science or naturalism, the problem is far from be-
ing so simple. We have not so tangible a point
from which to start. It is as if we were trying to
find the end or the beginning of the circle. Round
and round we go, caught in the endless and begin-

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ningless currents of the Creative Energy; no fixity
or finality anywhere; rest and motion, great and
small, up and down, heat and cold, good and evil,
near and far, only relative; cause and effect merging
and losing themselves in each other; life and death
perpetually playing into each other’s hands; interior
within interior; depth beneath depth; height above
height; the tangible thrilled and vibrating with the
intangible; the material in bonds to the non-mate-
rial; invisible, impalpable forces streaming around
us and through us; perpetual change and trans-
formation on every hand; every day a day of crea-
tion, every night a revelation of unspeakable gran-
deur: suns and systems forming in the cyclones of
stardust; the whole starry host of heaven flowing
like a meadow brook, but where, or whence, who can
tell? The center everywhere, the circumference no-
where; pain and pleasure, good and evil, inextri-
cably mixed; the fall of mana daily and hourly occur-
rence; the redemption of man, the same! Heaven or
hell waiting by every doorstep, boundless, begin-
ningless, unspeakable, immeasurable — what won-
der that we seek a short cut through this wilderness
and appeal to the supernatural?

When I look forth upon the world and see how,
regardless of man and his well-being, the operations
of Nature go on — how the winds and the storms
wreck him or destroy him, how the drought or the
floods bring to naught his industries, how not the

130

THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST}

least force in heaven or earth turns aside for him, or
makes any exception to him; in short, how all forms
of life are perpetually ground between the upper
and the nether millstones of the contending and
clashing natural material forces, I ask myself: ‘Is
there nothing, then, under the sun, or beyond the
sun, that has a stake in our well-being? Is life purely
a game of chance, and is it all luck that we are here
in a world so richly endowed to meet all our require-
ments?” Serene Reason answers: “‘ No, it is not luck
as in a lottery. It is the good fortune of the whole. It
was inherent in the constitution of the whole, and it
continues because of its adaptability; life is here be-
cause it fits itself into the scheme of things; it is
flexible and compromising.” We find the world
good to be in because we are adapted to it, and not
it to us. The vegetable growth upon the rocks
where the sea is forever pounding is a type of life;
the waves favor its development. Life takes advan-
tage of turbulence as well as of quietude, of drought
as well as of floods, of deserts as well as of marshes,
of the sea-bottom as well as of the mountain-tops.
Both animal and vegetable life trim their sails to
the forces that beat upon them. The image of the
sail is a good one. Life avails itself of the half-con-
trary winds; it captures and imprisons their push
in its sails; by yielding a little, it makes headway
in the teeth of the gale; it gives and takes; without
struggle, without opposition, life would not be life.
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

The sands of the shore do not struggle with the
waves, nor the waves with the sands; the buffeting
ends where it began. But trees struggle with the
wind, fish struggle with the flood, man struggles
with his environment; all draw energy from the
forces that oppose them. Life gains as it spends; its
waste is an investment. Not so with purely material
bodies. They are like the clock, they must be per-
petually wound from without. A living body is a
clock, perpetually self-wound from within. |

The faith and composure of the naturalist or
naturist are proof against the worst that Nature can
do. He sees the cosmic forces only; he sees nothing
directly mindful of man, but man himself; he sees
the intelligence and beneficence of the universe flow-
ering in man; he sees life as a mysterious issue of the
warring element; he sees human consciousness and
our sense of right and wrong, of truth and justice,
as arising in the evolutionary sequence, and turning
and sitting in judgment upon all things; he sees that
there can be no life without pain and death; that
there can be no harmony without discord; that op-
posites go hand in hand; that good and evil are in-
extricably mingled; that the sun and blue sky are
still there behind the clouds, unmindful of them;
that all is right with the world if we extend our
vision deep enough; that the ways of Nature are the
ways of God if we do not make God in our own
image, and make our comfort and well-being the

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prime object of Nature. Our comfort and well-being
are provided for in the constitution of the world, but
we may say that they are not guaranteed; they are
contingent upon many things, but the chances are
upon our side. He that would save his life shall lose
it — lose it in forgetting that the universe is not a
close corporation, or a patented article, and that it
exists for other ends than our own. But he who can
lose his life in the larger life of the whole shall save
it in a deeper, truer sense.

Vill

A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY

URING the Great War the question was

asked, “Do the inexorable laws of evolution
apply to human beings as they apply to the lower
animals and to plants?” Most assuredly they do,
but with a difference. Man is as certainly one of the
results of the evolutionary process as is the horse or
the dog, the tree or the plant. We are as certain of
his animal origin as we can well be of anything in
the biological history of the globe. But the inference
which has so often been drawn from this fact —
namely, that man’s development involves the same
factors, and is along parallel lines — is a fallacy.
That the supremacy of might, which has ruled, and
still rules in nature below man, justifies the rule of
might in human communities in our day, is an in-
vention of perverted human ambition.

As Nature rules by the law of might, and as man
is a part of Nature, why is he not under the same
rule? The answer is that man is an exceptional crea-
ture; that while he is a part of the animal kingdom,
he is a new kind of animal; and while he is the out-
come of evolution, like the rest, new factors which
are not operative in the orders below him have
played a leading part in his later development.

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A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY

These factors are his reason, which gives him a
sense of the true and the falsé, and his conscience,
which gives him a sense of right and wrong. These
faculties subordinate the rule of might to the rule
of right. They have resulted in the establishment of
standards of conduct for individuals, for communi-
ties, and for organized governments that do not
exist among the lower animal orders, and only ina
very limited sense in the lower human orders.

There is no question of right and wrong among
the plants of the field, or the trees of the forest, or
the birds of the air, or the beasts of the earth—
only the question of power to survive; might in the
sense of power of adaptation settles the question.

Since the dawn of history man’s moral and in-
tellectual faculties have come more and more to the
fore, the moral standards always lagging a little be-
hind the intellectual and the esthetic standards.
Among nearly all the more advanced ancient races
the concepts of justice, of mercy, and of fair dealing
were dull and sluggish in comparison with their in-
tellectual acumen and their artistic achievements.
The Greeks would lie and steal and set on foot
piratical expeditions against their neighbors, while
yet they produced such men as Aristotle and Plato,
and such artists a8 Phidias and Praxiteles.

In our day the whole civilized world was shocked
and alarmed by the moral lapse of a great people
ranking among the highest in intelligence and ma-

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terial efficiency, suddenly preaching and practicing
the doctrine of might over right which prevails in
the orders below man. The German philosophers
brazenly justified their nation’s course in their ag-
gressive war, with all its attendant horrors, by an
appeal to the Darwinian doctrines of the strug-
gle for existence, and the consequent survival of
the fittest, doctrines which play such a prominent
part in biological evolution. The nation suddenly
slumped into a barbarism worse than that of their
ancestral Huns. The Hun was again triumphant,
gloating over the prospect of the rich plunder and
the orgies of wine and lust that awaited him in new
fields of conquest. It was a spectacle to make the
Genius of Humanity veil her face and weep tears of
blood.

All that was noble and precious in international
relations; standards of conduct that it had taken
long generations to achieve; the peace and good-
will of the world; codperation in scientific fields, and
in endeavors toward human betterment — all went
by the board before the Teutonic debauch of greed
and Just for blood and conquest.

Seriously to discuss in our day the question of the
rule of might over right — that force is the arbiter
of justice in human relations, except when it is in-
voked to chastise the offender — seems a waste of
time. On how low a plane must a people live whose
leaders appeal to the way of the tiger with his prey,

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A FALLACY MADE IN GERMANY

or of the boa constrictor with his victim, in estab-
lishing relations with other peoples! This ferocious
appeal of kaiserism to predatory nature — to “Na-
ture red in tooth and claw” — in order to set itself
right before the conscience of mankind, is as fatuous
as it is fallacious. If we could reckon without the
sense of right and wrong, which has a survival value
as real as any form of physical might or power of
adaptation, especially with the later civilized na-
tions (except Germany), a different face would be
put upon the question. But we cannot. The flood-
tide of world democracy and humanity is setting too
strongly in that direction, and we can only hope
and pray that misguided Germany may in the new
generation be caught up and borne forward to new |
greatness and world usefulness, on the bosom of the
same tide.

IX
_ THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT.

I

HE biological law of the supremacy of the

strong over the weak, of the fit over the less
fit, which prevails throughout the world of living
things, gives us pause when it is applied to human
history and to the relations of man with man. Yet it
is true that the price of development is the struggle
for life. Theroad of evolutionis an uphill road. When
struggle ceases, progress ceases, and evolution be-
comes devolution. Our strength is the strength of
the obstacles we overcome. The living machine,
contrary to the non-living, gains power from the
friction it begets.

When we open the book of the biological history
of the globe, we find, to begin with, no force but
that which we call brute force, no justice but power,
no crime but weakness, no law but the law of battle.
The victory is to the strong and the race to the
swift. And it is well. It is on this plan, as I have so
often said, that the life of the globe has come to
what we behold it. Man has come to his present es-
tate, the trees in the forest, the grasses and flowers
of the field, the birds in the air, the fishes in the sea,
have each and all attained their present stage of

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

development through the operation of this. law of
natural competition, and the survival of the fittest.
Though marked by what we call cruelty and in-
justice, in the totality of its operations it is a benef-
icent law. If it were not so, how could the world of
living things have attained its present develop-
ment? If it were a malevolent law, would not life
have suffered shipwreck long ago? The world of
living things and of non-living still merits the primal
approval — “Behold, it is very good!” Not your
good, nor my good, but a general good, the good of
all. Nature’s scheme, if we may say she has a
scheme, embraces the totality of things, and that
the totality of things is good who but a born pessi-
mist, a radically negative nature, can deny? Mixed
good undoubtedly it is, but is there, or can there be,
any other good in the universe? Good forever free-
ing itself from the non-good, or from the fetters of
evil — good to eat, to drink, to behold, to live by,
to die by — good for the body, good for the mind,
good for the soul, good in time, and good in eternity?

From solar systems to atoms and molecules, the
greater bodies, the greater forces, prevail over the
lesser, and yet flowers bloom, and life is sweet, sweet
for the minor forms as well as for the major.

Inert matter knows only the laws of force. In the
world of living matter, up to a certain point, the
same rule prevails. In the fields and woods the more
vigorous plants and trees run out the less vigorous.

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

In the dryer meadows in my section of the Cat-
skills the orange hawkweed completely crowds out
the meadow grasses; it plants itself on every square
inch of the surface, and every four or five years the
farmer has to intervene with his plow to turn the
battle in favor of the grass again. In the gardens,
unless the gardener take a hand in the game, the
weeds choke down or smother all his vegetables.
The weeds are rank with original sin and they
easily supplant our pampered and cultivated cereals
and legumes.

In the animal world there are few exceptions to
the rule of the supremacy of power. There is no
question of right or wrong, of mercy or cruelty. It
is not cruel or unjust for the bird to catch the in-
sect, or for the cat to catch the bird, or for the lion
to devour the lamb, or for the big fishes to eat up
the little fishes. It is the rule of nature, and never a
question of right or wrong.

Biological laws are as remorseless as physical
Jaws. The course of animal evolution through the
geologic ages is everywhere marked by the triumph
of new and superior forms over the old and in-
ferior forms. Among the lower races of man, our
remote savage ancestors, might ruled. The strong
and prolific tribes supplanted those that were less
so, and, among the nations, up to our own day, the
rule of natural competition, or survival of the
fittest, has held full sway. Those nations which are

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

dominant are so by virtue of their superior quali-
ties, physical, moral, or intellectual. It is not a
question of might except in so far as this question
is linked with the question of moral and intellectual
superiority.

Is there, then, no such thing as equity, justice,
fair play in the world? Shall I seize my neighbor’s
farm and despoil him of his goods and chattels be-
cause I am stronger than he? Shall one state in-
vade and despoil another, or seize its territory, be-
cause it is stronger and considers itself more fit to
survive?

The rule of might, as I have said, prevails
throughout the world of matter and of life below
man, and long prevailed in pre-human and human
history. But the old law of nature has been limited
and qualified by a new Jaw which has come into the
world and which is just as truly a biological law in
its application to man as was the old law of might.
I refer to the law of man’s moral nature, the source
of right, justice, mercy. The progress of the race
and of the nations is coming more and more to
depend upon the observance of this law. Without
it there is no organization, no codperation, no com-
merce, no government. Without it anarchy would
rule, and our civilization would crumble and society
disintegrate.

The moral sense of mankind is now the dominant
fact in human history; the rule of might has been

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superseded by the rule of right. It is this sense in
the civilized world that has revolted so over-
whelmingly against the Prussian military power in
precipitating the World War; and this conscience
will probably be so developed and intensified by
the useless waste and cruelty of the war that such a
calamity will never again befall the world. Those
nations will become the most powerful that are the
most just, the most humane, that develop in the
highest. degree a world conscience, and realize the
most intensely that the nations all belong to one
family, in which the good and evil of one are the
good and evil of all. What can the progress of civ-
ilization mean but the progress of international
comity, sympathy, codperation, fair-dealing; in.
fact, the fullest recognition of the validity of the
ethical laws to which we hold individuals and com-
munities amenable?

History is full of violence, cruelty, injustice, and
the triumph of the strong over the weak, wherein
the end seemed to justify the means; yet never
since the world began did physical might alone
make moral right. The sheriff and the hangman
have made the doctrine unpopular among individ-
uals — the ethical sense of mankind will in time
make it equally unpopular among nations.

Nature is not moral; primitive biological laws
are not moral; they are unmoral. There is no moral
law until it is born of human intercourse; then it

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

becomes more and more a biological law, more and
more prominent in social and national progress.
The law of the jungle begins and ends in the jungle;
when we translate it into human affairs, we must
take the cruelty of the jungle out of it, and read it
in terms of beneficent competition. Man is the
jungle humanized; the fangs and claws are drawn,
and the stealthy spring gives place to open and
fair competition. _

If

In the Darwinian struggle for existence there is
first the struggle with environment, or with the non-
living forces — heat, cold, storm, wind, flood; the
organic always at war with the inorganic out of
which its power comes. The fateful physical and
mechanical forces go their way regardless of the
life that surrounds them and which draws its en-
ergy from them. Gravity would pull down every
tree and shrub and every animal that walks or flies.
The wind and the storm would flatten down the
flowers and grasses and grains like a steam roller,
and often succeeds in doing so. See the timothy and
wheat and corn struggle to lift themselves again.
Behold how the trees grip the rocks and soil, and
brace themselves against. the wind! This struggle is,
of course, not a conscious one. Apart from the origi-
nal push of life, it can all be explained in terms
of physics and chemistry. The bio-chemist will tell
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“ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

you why the plant leans toward the light, and why
it rights itself when pressed down; but why or how
matter organizes itself into the various living forms
is a question before which natural philosophy is
dumb. Neither chemistry nor physics can give us
the secret of life. The ingenious devices to secure
cross-fertilization among certain plants, devices for
scattering the seed among others, — the hooks, the
wings, the springs, —to me all seem to imply in-
telligence, not apart from, but inherent in, the
things themselves. Power of adaptation — to take
advantage of wind and flood, of solid and fluid —
is one of the mysterious attributes of life. And yet
we know that vegetable life takes advantage of
these things not, as we do, by forethought and
invention, but by a mysterious inherent impulse.

How the bee and the bird battle with the wind,
the fish with the waves and the rapids, the fur-
bearers with the cold and the snow! how all living
creatures struggle to escape or resist the dissolving
power of the natural forces!

The ever-present instinct of fear in all wild crea-
tures and in children, and the quickness with which
it can be aroused in all persons, throw light upon
the crueler aspects of this struggle for existence
which is common to all forms of animal life. Had
life never been beset with perils, we should have
been strangers to the emotion of fear, as would all
other creatures. Even the fly that alights on my

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

paper as I write fears my hand. It is ever on guard
against its natural enemies. This is the proof of the
universal struggle. Among the lower forms the
struggle or competition of the fleet with the slow,
the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed, the
sharp-eared, and the keen of scent with those less
so; of the miscellaneous feeders with the more
specialized feeders; and, among mankind, the com-
petition of men of purpose, of foresight, of judg-
ment, of experience, of probity, and of other per-
sonal resources, with men who are deficient in these
things; and, among nations and peoples, the in-
evitable competition of those who cherish the high-
est national ideals, the best-organized governments,
the best race inheritance, the most natural resources,
and so on, with the less fortunate in these respects
— all this struggle and competition, I say, is benefi-
cent and on the road to progress.

Myriads of different types of animal and vege-
table life fit into the scheme of organic nature with-
out conflict or hindrance, but when there is con-
flict, the strong prevail. The small and the gigantic,
the feeble and the mighty, the timid and the bold,
the frail and the robust — birds, insects, mice,
squirrels, cattle — exist in the same landscape and
all prosper. Only when there is rivalry do the feeble
- go to the wall, which means only that their numbers
are kept down. The cats do not exterminate the
mice and rats, nor do the hawks and owls extermi-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

nate the other birds; they are a natural check on
their undue increase, Nature’s checks and balances
are all important. When species subsist upon spe-
cles, as weasels upon rodents and hawks upon other
birds, there seems to be some law that keeps the
bloodthirsty in check. Why should there be so few
weasels, since they appear as prolific as their vic-
tims? Why so few pigeon hawks, since the hawks
have no natural enemies, while the trees swarm with
finches and robins?

The conflicting interests in Nature sooner or
later adjust themselves; her checks and balances
bring about her equilibrium. In vegetation rivalries
and antagonisms bring about adaptations. The
‘mosses and the ferns and the tender wood plants
grow beneath the oaks and the pines and are
favored by the shade and protection which the
latter afford them. The farmer’s seeding of grass
and clover takes better under the shade of the oats
than it would upon the naked ground, In Africa
some species of flesh-eaters live upon the leavings
of larger and stronger species, and in the tropics
certain birds become benefactors of the cattle by
preying upon the insects that pester them. Fabre
tells of certain insect hosts that blindly favor the
parasites that destroy them. The scheme has
worked itself out that way and Nature is satisfied.
Victim or victor, host or parasite, it is all one to her.
Life goes on, and all forms of it are hers.

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

It is easy to see why the wild plants run out the
cultivated ones — the latter are the result of arti-
ficial selection. No favor has been shown the wild
ones, and hence only the most vigorous have sur-
vived. The cultivated plants always have a greater
burden to bear than the wild ones, and man helps
them to bear it, or, rather, he saddles it upon them.
The cultivated races of man have burdens to bear
also, much greater than the savage tribes, but this
is more than made up to them by their superior
brain power, which brain power again has come
about in the struggle for existence. Wild tribes have
also been under the discipline of natural selection,
but by reason of some obscure factors of race or
climate or geography they have not profited as
have the European and Asiatic races. Their moral
natures are more rudimentary.

Doubtless some obscure or unknown factors in
the original germ-cells, far back in biological times,
caused the divergence and splitting-up of animal
forms, and gave to one an impulse that carried it
higher in the scale of development than its fellows,
just as the same thing happens in human families
in our own times. Why some creatures are higher
and some are lower, why some eventuated in the
bird and some in toad and frog and snake and
lizard, is one of the mysteries. In seeking the ex-
planation of these things on natural grounds we
are compelled to resort to the fertile expedient of

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

conjecture, and pack the germ with many possibili-
ties, each one depending for its development upon
chance occurrence or conditions.

Besides this struggle with the environment there
is the struggle of individuals and of species with
one another — of oak with oak, of beech with
beech, of plant with its kind, for the moisture and
nutriment in the soil; of robin with robin for in-
sects and fruit, of fox with fox for mice and rabbits,
and of lion with lion for antelope and zebra. I say
“struggle,” but it is rarely struggle in the sense of
strife or battle, but in the sense of natural com-
petition — the victory is to the most lucky and the
most vigorous — the sharpest eye, the quickest
ear, the most nimble foot; and those most favored
by fortune win. ,

Under the law of variation some individuals
have a fuller endowment of vital energy than others;
under a severe strain and trial of whatever kind
the favored ones will survive, while the others per-
ish. Some men, some animals, can endure more
hardships than others; under the same conditions
all will not starve or freeze or fall exhausted by the
wayside at the same time. In the vegetable world
the same inequality in the gift of life exists, though
not in the same degree. Some seeds will lie dor-
mant in the soil longer than others of the same kind,
and some kinds longer than others. Some seeds will
not sprout after the second year, but a few may

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

sprout after the third or even the fourth year. The
stream of life is not of uniform depth and fullness;
it is shallow in some places, and deep in others, as re-
gards both species and individuals. In the natural
competition which goes on all around us, the strong-
est, the fittest, win in the game, not necessarily by
violence, but because, apart from the réle played
by chance, they carry more pounds of vital pressure.
Not all acorns become oaks, probably not one in
thousands; not all bird’s eggs become birds; occa-
sionally one egg in the nest does not hatch, prob-
ably because of some defect in fertilization. Some
nests are torn out of the trees by storms, or are
robbed by crows or jays or squirrels; they were not
well hidden. A large percentage of nests on the
ground is destroyed by night prowlers or by day
prowlers; chance again plays a great part here.
Only a small fraction of the spawn of fishes hatches,
and a still smaller percentage of the hatched ever
reaches maturity. Fortune, good or bad, plays a
great part with all forms of life. The acorn that
becomes an oak owes much to chance — chance of
position and soil, and chance of the vicissitudes of
the woods and fields. Falling trees or branches, or
the foot of a passing animal, may crush or deform it,
or a squirrel or a raccoon devour it. Barring these
‘accidents, it owes, or may owe, not a little to its
inherent vitality —to its real oakhood.

The natural competition, or the struggle for

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

existence among mankind, is of similar character,
though on the whole less fortuitous. Codperation,
knowledge, altruism, have done much to eliminate
the element of chance. An acorn becomes an oak
where ten thousand other acorns fail, mainly by
luck, while the child becomes the man mainly
through the care and nurture of his parents and of
the community in which he lives, but he reaches a
position of power and prominence largely through
his inherent capabilities. Fortune plays a part here
also, as it did with Lincoln and Lee and Grant, but
these men all had the native endowment upon which
Fortune could build.

In the natural competition that goes on in every
town and city, the success of one man over another

is not, as a rule, the result of violence or wrong; men .

of high purpose and character in business and pro-
fessional life add to the positive wealth and well-
being of all; they often lift the whole community to
a higher and better standard of living; the unfit
profit by the achievements of the fit. The men who
have added to the wealth and well-being of this
country could be counted by the thousands. It is
also true that the men who have accumulated their
millions at the expense of others, by fraud and chi-
canery, or have diverted the earnings of others into
their own coffers, could be counted by the thou-
sands. It is this class of men who make the poor
poorer. But did the achievements of such men as
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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

the late James J. Hill make the poor poorer? Such
men add enormously to the wealth of the nation.

With all its discounts and set-backs, the natural
struggle for existence has carried the whole race for-
ward. Even business competition may be entirely
beneficent. Two men open shops or houses in simi-
lar lines in the same town and one outstrips the
other. Maybe his location is the better; one side of a
street may be more favorable to success than the
other side. Maybe he is more affable in manner,
more thorough in his methods, more accommodat-
ing, more fair-minded, of sounder judgment — in
fact, the better man in a beneficent sense.

On a broad view, throughout any country, this
will be found to be true: success in business, in the
professions, on the farm, in the manufactory, comes
to those who deserve it. It cannot be otherwise. The
world is thus made. Among the nations the same
rule holds. England has earned all the power she has
got. She is endowed with the gift of empire. Solid
merit alone tells in the long run, as well among
nations as among individual men. The worth of
France rests upon solid qualities. The worth of
Germany is inherent in the character of her people.
That she has run to Krupp guns and Kaiserism dur-
ing these later generations, and has coveted the
land and the gold of her neighbors, is one of those -
human calamities analogous to tornadoes and
earthquakes. |

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“ ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

In the course of modern history, race supplants
race, not so much by force of arms as by force of
brain. The Europeans know how to utilize the natu-
ral forces and make the stars fight on their side. So
far as they have done it by wars of conquest, they
have violated the great moral law and the law of
natural competition. All wars of conquest by civi-
lized nations are wicked wars. They are becoming
more and more odious to mankind, and are bound
to become still more so, till they cease entirely. A
century ago the conduct of Germany in the recent
war would have shocked mankind far less than it
has to-day. A century hence such an exhibition of
the rule of the jungle among civilized peoples will be
impossible. If Germany could ever come to be the
dominant power in Europe, it would be through the
Jaw of natural competition. Her superior efficiency
in the arts of peace, could alone give her the vic-
tory. It would have given her the victory in her own
age had she been contented with its slow but sure
operation.

Til

THE question of right and wrong must have

emerged, so as to become a factor in the evolution

of human society, very slowly — how slowly, we

can never know. But it did emerge, and is still

emerging more and more; first probably in the deal-

Ing of man with man, then in the dealing of families
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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

with other families. In the dealing of tribes with
tribes in prehistoric times, the question of right and
wrong played probably little or no part; might alone
settled matters. In what we call the pagan world,
among the early Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and
Romans, the law of might in the dealings of one na-
tion with another prevailed, and up to our own
time the standard of international morality has
been, and still is, far below the standard among in-
dividuals and neighborhood communities. Even in
the United States there is a crying want of public
conscience. The people are preyed upon by men
they elect to serve them. The men or corporations
that take pleasure and satisfaction in serving the
public well and reasonably, or in giving a quid pro
quo, are rare. Men who are blameless in their per-
sonal dealings with one another will, when formed
into a board of directors or trustees, rob railroads,
and squander money not their own. Capitalists will
band together to rob the state through the con-
struction of sham highways or flimsy public build-
ings. A public conscience is among all peoples of
slow growth, and an international conscience is still
slower. What part has it played in the history of
Europe? Surely a very minor part. The Golden Rule
has been turned into an iron rule of might over
right times without number, by all the nations re-
cently engaged in war.

As man’s moral consciousness has developed, the

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

question of right and wrong has, of course, come
more and more to the front; his relations to his fel-
lows, his sense of justice, of truth, of fair dealing,
have occupied him more and more. His savage in-
stincts have been held more and more in check. The
codperation and sympathy and good-will which
have brought about his present civilization would
have been possible on no other terms. Without a
sense of justice, of love of truth, of ideal right,
where should we have been to-day? The fittest to
survive among mankind were those races that had
the moral consciousness most fully developed. This
gave a might which led to.a permanent supremacy
— a beneficent might. A malevolent might is one
that is founded upon superior brute or material
strength alone. The law of the jungle or of the tor-
nado or of the avalanche, introduced into human
affairs and unchecked by the law of man’s moral —
nature, leads to wars of conquest, as it did to the

World War.

IV
THE expounders of the benefits of war write and
speak about it as if it were some system of hygiene
or medicine or gymnastic training that a people
could practice in and of themselves; whereas wars
of conquest do not begin and end at home. There
are two parties to such a war. If it is a benefit to the
victors, what is it to the defeated? I am speaking, of

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

course, of material benefits. The benefits that come
from heroism and self-denial are of another order.
If the lamb inside the lion is a benefit to the lion,
what is it to the lamb? If Germany reaped advan-
tage by her invasion of Belgium, what did Belgium
reap? But the fate of the other party is the last
question that would ever occur to the Prussian
military mind. If the doctrine of frightfulness began
and ended at home, the world could not object. Be-
cause burned cities in modern times rise from their
ashes in new beauty and power, shall we therefore
seek to rejuvenate our cities by applying a match to
them? Cities rise from their ashes because of their
stored-up wealth and because of the arteries of
commerce and industry that flow through them.
Fire does not rejuvenate a dead tree nor a dead city,
nor does war rejuvenate a people who are in a state
of mortal ripening. It did not rejuvenate Rome in
ancient times, nor Spain in modern times, and it
does not appear to be rejuvenating Mexico very
fast, nor any of the South American republics. All
depends upon the stock you are trying to rejuve-
nate.

Lord Roberts is quoted as saying, just before his
death, that war is necessary and salutary, and that
it is the only national tonic that can be prescribed
when peace begets degeneracy in an over-civilized
people. He looked upon Germany as the greatest
friend of the Allies when she declared war against

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them. But could there be any better proof that
peace had not begotten degeneracy in England or
France or Russia than the promptness with which
these countries took up the challenge of Prussian
militarism, and the fortitude and self-denial with
which they gave it blow for blow?

Under the smiling face of peace, when the de-
mand is made, the heroic element is always found to
be slumbering. Every day, in the industrial and
scientific fields, men prove themselves the same
heroes that they do on the field of battle, and they
prove it without the excitement and stimulus that
war gives; and women prove it in times of peace and
times of war.

The gospel of war as a national tonic in our time
is a delusion and a snare. Are we to get up a war off-
hand because we think the nations need that kind
of medicine? Blood-letting is a strange remedy for
the depleted condition to which Lord Roberts re-
fers. War sets up the victorious nation, but how
about the defeated one? Have the defeats of Spain
in the past two or three hundred years set her
up? Have the defeats of Turkey redounded to her
glory and power? Little doubt that this World
War will bear fruit, but it will be a kind of fruit
the combatant did not seek or expect.

The conclusion, then, that I arrive at is that a
new rule of conduct for nations as for individuals, a
new biological law, has come into being through

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THE PRICE OF DEVELOPMENT

man’s moral nature, his sense of right and wrong.
There is no question of right or of wrong in the
world of living things below man, and we can per-
suade ourselves that there is only by putting our-
selves in the place of the struggling animal forces.
And there is no question of right and of wrong in the
human world till man’s consciousness of this differ-
ence has begun to dawn. In our day this conscious-
ness is sufficiently developed to become the ruling
factor in the conduct of national and international
affairs, and must very soon put an end to all armed
human conflicts. In saying this I am not exploit-
ing a theory; I am trying to state an indisputable
scientific fact.

X
TOOTH AND CLAW

I

O deny that Nature is cruel, in the strict sense

of the term, were, to the majority of persons,
like denying that blood is red, or that fire will burn.
We use the term “cruel” loosely, and interpret the
ways of Nature in terms of our own psychology.
' Tf we are torn by thorns or stung by nettles or
bitten by snakes or suffer from frost-bites or sun-
stroke, we accuse Nature of cruelty, always assum-
ing, in our conceit, that we are the lords of creation,
and that things were made especially for us. We
have no venomous snake that will bite us except in
self-defense, nor any bee that will sting us except on
the same grounds.

Even Darwin, in a letter to his friend Hooker, re-
fers to the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, slow, and
horribly cruel works of Nature,” thus treating the
All-Mother with scant respect.

Amiel cannot say, as he does say, that “Nature is
unjust and shameless, without probity and without
faith,” unless he makes her over into man or invests
her with the human consciousness. Even the good
Emerson accuses Nature of being unscrupulous.
Did the Concord philosopher expect storms and,

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frost and blight and thunderbo!ts to have scruples?
Did he expect thorns and nettles and fleas and
potato-bugs and grasshoppers and disease-germs to
consider their ways?

A well-known philosopher and writer, Professor
Jacks, of Manchester College, Oxford, in writing
upon “Our Common Foe,” takes it for granted at
the outset that Nature is cruel, and, moreover, that
she is as cruel as the Germans showed themselves to
be in the cruelest of all wars. “There is a cruelty in
Nature,” he says, “and it has been reserved for our
age to realize how immense is its range and how ap-
palling its effects”; we realize it, he says, when we
read the story of Germany’s treatment of her pris-
oners, the story of her submarines, and her conduct
toward unoffending non-combatants generally.

What worse thing could be said about Nature
than that she is as bad as the Germans? It almost
makes us suspect treachery and death in her sum-
mer breezes and her sunshine. Dr. Jacks seeks to
justify his charge by averring that man is a part of
Nature and that in him are summarized her good
and her evil qualities. Of course, in a certain sense
this is true. But in seeking to solve the problems of
his life, man separates himself from the rest of Na-
ture and holds himself amenable to standards of
conduct that he does not apply to the orders below
him. He regards himself as a superior being. He is a
part of Nature, but of an emancipated and regener-

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

ated Nature. He is one with the beasts of the field
and the fowls of the air only in his purely animal
aspects. As a moral and spiritual being with a sense
of truth and justice, of mercy and forgiveness, he
stands on a higher plane. He cannot justify his con-
duct by an appeal to brute nature or to biological
laws. His sins are more scarlet and his virtues more
divine than those of his unmoral and unreasoning
brute neighbors. His consciousness of right and
wrong is the touchstone by which all his deeds are
to be tried.

Tennyson’s agonizing line “Nature red in tooth
and claw” tends, especially in the days of world-
wide human carnage, to make one see the whole
animal kingdom with blood-dripping claws and
jaws. But it is not so. At its worst this “tooth and
claw” business applies only to a fraction of wild
life. The vast army of the seed-eaters, the plant-
eaters, the fruit-eaters, upon which the flesh-eaters
subsist, and which they help keep in check, is
greatly in the ascendancy.

The whole truth of this matter of the cruelty of
Nature may be put in a nutshell: Nature as seen in
animal life is sanguinary, but only man is cruel.
Only man deliberately and intentionally inflicts
pain; only man tortures his victims, and takes
pleasure in their agony. No other creature goes out
of its way to inflict suffering; no other creature acts
from the motive of cruelty or the will to give pain.

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Nature kills, but does not torture. The biological
laws are neither human nor inhuman; they are un-
human. If in following the rule that might makes
right, the Germans sought justification by an ap-
peal to biological laws, they fell below the beasts
of the fields, because they are moral beings, and
know good from evil.

Biological laws are not concerned about the moral
law. Not till we reach man’s moral nature does this
law have any validity; then it becomes a biological
law, because it has survival value. Could the race of
man ever have developed as we now see it without
the conceptions of right and justice and the spirit of
mutual helpfulness? As time passes, other things
being equal, the most righteous and humanitarian
nation will be the most powerful and the most pro-
gressive. The great strength of the Allied cause in
the World War was that it was founded upon an
ideal conception of international justice and com-
ity. President Wilson set this forth in such wonder-
ful completeness that it will shine in our political
firmament for all time like a star of the first magni-
tude. And the weakness of the German cause was
that it was based upon the spirit and the aims of the
pirate and the highwayman.

When we speak of Nature’s cruelty we are ob-
sessed with the idea that blood and death necessa-
rily mean cruelty, whereas cruelty, as I have said,
means an intentional infliction of pain or suffering.

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Is the surgeon cruel when he performs an operation?
Do our own carnivorous habits imply cruelty? The
slaughter-house is not a pleasant object to contem-
plate; the sight of blood disturbs most of us; its
sight and smell excite even the unreasoning brutes.
But it is the wanton shedding of blood that reacts
unfavorably upon ourselves, and makes us indiffer-
ent to the suffering which blood so often implies.
Life is a wonderful and precious gift, and we do not
like to see it wantonly destroyed.

Professor Jacks speaks of “‘the hot, foul breath of
Nature’s cruelty,” a sentence mild enough when
applied to the Germans, but not justified when ap-
plied to universal Nature. We can hardly accuse the
laws of matter and force of being cruel when they
destroy us; if they were not true to themselves, what
permanence would there be to life or to anything
else? Fire and flood, the earthquake and the tor-
nado, cause pain and death, gravity will crush us as
soon as sustain us, but these forces are not cruel, beé-
cause there is no will to inflict suffering; they are a
part of the system of things upon which our life and
well-being depend.

Nature, in the action of her mechanical and
chemical forces as they go their way about us, is, as I
have so often said, apparently as indifferent to man
as to all other forms of life, but, to speak in the
same terms of our human experience, something
must have been solicitous about man or he would

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not be here in a world so well suited to his develop-
ment and well-being. In the conflict of forces he has
had to take his chances with other forms of life, but
his powers of adaptation and invention far surpass
those of all other creatures. Not an atom, not a peb-
ble, will turn aside to save him from destruction.
Unrelenting and unpitying Nature is the school in
which his powers have been developed, and for him
to call Nature “cruel” in her treatment of him is
for a child to upbraid the parent whose guidance
and discipline foster and safeguard the coming man.
Could man have become man on any other terms?

Love is creation’s final law, though Tennyson
seems to doubt it when he sees Nature “red in tooth
and claw.” But tooth and claw do not necessarily
imply cruelty, since the cruelest of all animals —
man — has them not; they imply the dependence of
one form of life upon another form, and are associ-
ated in our minds with that most heinous of all
crimes, murder. It is Nature’s seeming indiffer-
ence to life which causes us to charge her with cru-
elty. Our minds can take in but a fraction of the
total scheme of things, and what we do take in we
make a personal application of to ourselves. We
humanize when we should generalize.

The Germans willfully turned their backs upon
the natural biological law of righteousness or right-
ness, and their punishment has been swift and ade-
quate. They made a religion of cruelty, as man

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' ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

alone has exhibited it, and cultivated the will to
destroy and defame till mankind, with one accord,
bestowed upon them their ancestral name, the
Huns. They went forth to burn and pillage and
murder, and, so far as lay in their power, to destroy
the very earth of the peoples they sought to con-
quer. They summoned to their aid all the diabolical
forces of which chemistry is capable, and if they
could have controlled the seismic and meteorologi-
cal forces as well, who doubts that they would have
made a desert, blackened with fire and torn by
earthquakes, where dwell the nations that opposed
them?

The spirit they showed in the World War, and
the nefarious crimes of which they were guilty, make
it a serious question whether or not they should not
be forever cast out from the family of civilized na-
tions; whether, indeed, they should not be com-
pletely wiped off the map as a nation, and their
power for further evil forever destroyed.

“There is no place in the world of the future,”
says Dr. Jacks, “for a people whose policy is tainted
by the instinct for cruelty.”

If Nature were as cruel as the Germans are, if the
same lust for blood and suffering had run in her
veins, if she had, in the same spirit of riot and wan-
tonness, destroyed her own creatures and laid waste
her own provinces, would you or I, or any one else,
have been here to pass judgment upon her doings?

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There is blood and death in the jungle, but no
lust of pain; but in the German prisons, and in the
path of Germany’s armies, there was the deliberate
infliction of suffering and agony for their own sakes,
so that for generations to come the name of Ger.
many will stand for all that is selfish, cruel, un-
chivalrous, ignoble, insulting, and bestial in human
history. The Prussian officer spat in the face of his
prisoners of a like rank, and followed this with in-
sulting epithets and blows, seeking in every way to
bring them down to his own bestial level. The Prus-
sian nurse brought to a wounded British soldier the
glass of water he begged for, held it close to his face
then poured it on the ground, handing him the
empty glass.

II
Nature has an anesthetic of her own which she
uses in taking life. The carnivorous animals inflict
far less pain than appearances would seem to indi-
cate. Tooth and claw usually overwhelm by a sud-
den blow, and sudden blows benumb and paralyze.
Violence in this light is the handmaiden of Mercy.
If the surgeon could perform his operations in the
same sudden and violent manner, an anzsthetic
would rarely be needed. Livingstone was conscious
of but little pain when in the jaws of a lion, and its
prey no doubt feels as little. The human criminal,
electrocuted or hung or beheaded, probably experi-
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

ences but little physical suffering. Any one whose
life has been suddenly imperiled by a railway or a
runaway accident knows how blessed is the blank-
ness which comes over his mind at the most critical
moment; the suddenness and intensity of his alarm
blots. out consciousness, and he retains no memory
of just what happened. The soldier in battle may be
seriously or fatally wounded and not be aware of it
till some time afterward. A crushing or tearing
blow disrupts the machinery of sensation. It is only
when we put ourselves in the place of the mouse
with which the cat is playing that we pity it; it does
not experience the agony we should feel under like
conditions; it is usually unwounded; it does not
know what awaits it and its comparative freedom
of movement soothes its alarm.

Dr. Jacks speaks of the bloody work of the strug-
gle for existence, but the struggle for existence is
largely a bloodless struggle of adaptation. Through
it, every creature sooner or later finds its place, finds
where it fits into the scheme of things. Through it
the mouse finds its place, and the lion its, and man
has found his. Living bodies are not ready-made, so
to speak, like the parts of machinery; they are con-
stantly in the making, and their making is a process
of transformation. The horse, as we know him, was
millions of years in the making; so was the elephant;
SO Was man; so was every other form of life. The
struggle for existence as a whole is cruel only so far

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as all discipline and all insensible modifications and
adaptations under the pressure of environment are
cruel; it is good in the guise of evil; it is the stern
beneficence of impartia! law. The greater the power
of adaptation, the more fit is the animal or plant to
survive, and this power of adaptation is mainly
what distinguishes living bodies from non-living.
Inanimate bodies tend to adjust themselves to one
another through mechanical laws; animate bodies
tend to adapt themselves to one another and to
their environment through vital law.

The struggle for existence is for the most part a
struggle with inanimate nature — with climate, soil,
wind, flood. A peaceful struggle is going on all
around us at all times, among men as among ani-
mals and plants: a struggle to live, to compel Nature
to yield us the things needed for our lives. It is not
often competition — an effort to win what another
must lose; it is an effort to seize and appropriate the
elements that all may have on equal terms, by the
exercise of strength, industry, wit, prudence. Life is
predaceous only to a limited extent. In the wilds, in
the jungle, one form devours another form, but na-
ture compensates. A fuller measure of life is given to
those forms that are the prey of other forms; they
are more prolific. The rats and mice are vastly more
prolific than the weasels or the owls that feed upon
them; the rabbits have ten young to one of their
enemy, the fox; the lesser birds greatly outnumber

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the hawks; the little fishes that are the food of the
big fishes swarm in the sea.

Probably no species is ever exterminated by its
natural enemies. These enemies only keep it in
check. The birds keep the insects from ruining vege-
tation, which is the source of all food. Slay all the
lions in Africa, and probably the struggle for exist-
ence of the antelope tribe would soon be harder
than it is now. Hence the animals of prey are a good
gift even to the animals they prey upon. The plus of
the breeding instinct of the latter would in time re-
sult in overpopulation and in famine.

The things that are preyed upon are more joyous
and contented than their enemies. The carnivorous
animals are solitary and morose; the birds of prey
are the same. The chipmunk seems to have a much
better time than the weasel, the bluebird than the
owl that lines its nest with blue feathers. One might
envy the song sparrow, or the vesper sparrow, or
the robin, but never the shrike nor the sharp-
skinned hawk that pursues them. The eagle is a
grand bird, but evidently the lark is much the hap-
pier. The jay devours the eggs and the young of the
smaller birds, but these birds greatly outstrip him
in the race of life. The murderers evidently have
less joy in their lives than the murdered. The crow
rarely sheds blood, and, compared with the hawk,
he is a happy-all-the-year-round vagabond.

Nature has made the wild creatures fearful of .

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TOOTH AND CLAW

their natural enemies, and has endowed them with
means to escape them; then she has equipped these
enemies with weapons and instincts to defeat this
(her own) purpose. She plays one hand against an-
other. Wild life is divided into two warring camps,
and, as in our own wars, new devices for defense on
the one hand are met with new devices of attack on
the other. The little night rodents have big and
sharp eyes, but the owl that preys upon them has
big and sharp eyes also, and his flight is as silent as
a shadow. You see, Nature is impartial; she has the
good of all creatures at heart. If it is good for the
hawk to eat the bird, it is good for the bird to be
equipped with swift wings‘and sharp eyes to evade
the hawk. ‘A little more advantage on either side
and the game would be blocked — the birds would
fail or the hawks would starve. As it is, “‘the race is
to the swift and the battle to the strong.’ Nature
keeps the balance. Action and reaction are equal.
The skunk and the porcupine have little or no fear;
neither have they much wit. Their weapons of de-
fense are nearly always ready, and that of the por-
cupine acts automatically; that of the skunk is a
little more deliberate and inflicts less pain, but gives
great discomfort and discomfiture.

Nature keeps one form in check with another
form, and thus, like a wise capitalist, distributes her
investments so that the income is constant. If she
put her funds all in mice and birds, the cats and

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owls would soon starve; if she put them all in wood- ©
chucks, the pastures and meadows would soon fail
the herds. And this reminds me how man often dis-
turbs the balance of nature; the clearing-up and the
cultivation of the land have held in check the natu-
ral enemies of the woodchucks — foxes and owls —
at the same time that they have greatly increased:
the woodchuck’s sources of food-supply, so that in
some sections these rodents have become a real pest
to the farmer. The same changed conditions appre-
ciably favor the meadow mice, and they, too, seem
to be on the increase. But this increase again may
stimulate the increase of the mice-hunting hawks,
and thus the balance be maintained. Herein lies the
danger of introducing new forms of wild life in a
country — their natural enemies are not always on
hand to check them. The mongoose has overrun
Jamaica and has not yet found an adequate natural
enemy. Introduced into this country, it would be
an incalculable calamity, though in time it would
doubtless meet with a natural check. Our weasels,
related to the mongoose, are prolific, and seem to
have few natural enemies, and yet they do not
unduly increase; it seems as if some unknown hand
must stay them. They prey upon all the smaller
rodents and find them easy victims, yet these ro-
dents are vastly more numerous than the blood-
suckers. I often see marks upon the snow where the
muskrat and the rabbit have fallen before them, and:
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TOOTH AND CLAW

yet one sees scores of these animals to one weasel or
mink.

How our domestic animals would suffer if they
had the gift of ideation and knew what awaited
them! Pope anticipated me when he wrote:

“The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason could he skip and play?

‘*Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.”

If the horse only knew his own strength, and
knew that he had “‘rights,’’ would there not soon be
a horse rebellion? Would the swine and the cattle
fatten in their pens and stalls if they knew what is
before them? Animals suffer no mental anguish
either over the past or concerning the future; they
live in the present moment; no future looms before
them, no past haunts their memories. Their pain is
brief, their joy is unconscious; they live to feed and
breed; they slay without penalties, and they are
slain without remorse; they find their place and live
their day, and Mother Nature reaps the harvest.

Would we have a world without struggle or pain
or friction of any kind? Good means ease, leisure,
security; but it means something more: it means
achievement, victory, the overcoming of evil, the
development of power, the making of the world a
better place to live in, and much more. Is Nature a
tyrant because we have to earn our living? Because

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we have to plow and plant and hoe? Because flood
and fire will destroy us, and the winds rack us, if
we loose our grip? We have life on these terms; they
are the conditions that beget and sustain life. A
world void of evil, as we use the word, would be a
world void of good also, a negative world. Without
death there can be no life; without struggle there
can be no power.

XI
MEN AND TREES

DO not see that Nature is any more solicitous

about the well-being of man than she is, say,
about the well-being of trees. She is solicitous about
the well-being of all life, so far as the conditions of
life favor its development and continuance — men
and trees alike. But all have to run the gantlet of
some form of hostile forces — the trees one kind,
man another. What I mean is that evil in some form
waits upon all — hindrances, accidents, defeat,
failure, death.

The trees and the forests have their enemies and
accidents and set-backs, and men and communities
of men have analogous evils. Trees are attacked by
worms, blight, tornadoes, lightning, and men are
attacked by pestilence, famine, wars, and all man-
ner of diseases. Every tree struggles to stand up-
right; it is the easiest and only normal position.
Men aspire to uprightness of thought and conduct,
but a thousand accidental conditions prevent most
of them from attaining it. One tree in falling is likely
to bring down, or to mutilate, other trees, as the
moral or business downfall of a strong man in
a community is quite sure to bring evil to many
others around him. Trees struggle with one another

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for moisture and sustenance from the soil, and for
a place in the sun, as men do in the community, and
the most lucky, or the most fit, survive. Nature
plans for a perfect tree as she plans for a perfect
man, but both tree and man have to take their
chances with hostile forces and conditions amid
which their lot falls, so that an absolutely perfect
oak or elm or pine is about as rare as a perfect man.
Of course Nature has endowed man with mental
and spiritual powers which she has not bestowed
upon trees. These powers give man an advantage
over trees, but not the same advantage over men —
his own kind of tree — because his fellows are simi-
larly endowed. His struggle with his own kind is as
inevitable as the struggle of trees with their kind,
with this advantage in favor of the trees: theirs is al-
ways a peaceful competition, it never takes the form
of destructive wars. Trees of opposite kinds will
draw away from one another; a pine will draw away
from a maple or an oak, not, I suppose, because of
any natural antagonism, but because it is less mo-
bile and its tender but more rigid branches cannot
stand the buffetings of the more mobile and flexible
deciduous trees. Pine loves to associate with pine,
and spruce with spruce. The spirit, the atmosphere
of a pine or a hemlock forest, how different from
that of a beech or a maple! Most trees tend to asso-
ciate themselves together in large bodies, as did
primitive man, and civilized man, too, for that mat-
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MEN AND TREES

ter. The conifers are more clannish than the decidu-
ous trees.

Are not a generation of leaves and a generation of
men subject to about the same laws of chance? The
baby leaves have their enemies in insects that de-
vour them, in blight that withers them, in frost that
cuts them short, and when they are matured, how
the winds buffet them (Nature does n’t temper the
wind to the tender leaf), how the gales lash them,
how the hail riddles them! If they had powers
of thought, what a struggling, agitated, unstable
world they would think themselves born into!
When a summer tempest strikes a maple- or an oak-
tree, the strain and stress of the foliage is almost
painful to witness. Yet when the tempest subsides,
hardly a leaf is torn or detached, and when autumn
comes, the ranks of the vast army of the leaves are
but little thinned, and the great majority of leaves
ripen and fall to the ground unscathed. They have
come through the campaign of life and have experi-
enced many ups and downs, and yet, on the whole,
they have each had an active and useful life. The
leaf-rollers have made their nests in a few of certain
kinds of them, the leaf-cutters have made holes in
certain other kinds, the gall insects have made their
nurseries at the expense of still other kinds; but all
these things amount to a small fraction of the whole.
When a plague of forest worms comes and strips the
maples or the beeches, or a plague of elm-beetles

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strips the elms, and the inyasion of a foreign deadly
fungus kills all the chestnuts, these calamities are
paralleled by the plagues that in past times have
swept away large numbers of human beings and
depopulated whole countries, or by epidemic dis-
eases, such as infantile paralysis, that now and then
rage over widespread areas.

Go and sit down in our mixed beech, maple, birch,
and oak woods and witness the varying fortunes of
the trees. How many of them have had misfortunes
of one kind or another! How few, if any, have
reached their ideal! How many are diseased or dying
at the top or decaying at the root! Some have been
mutilated by the fall of other trees. Youth and age
meet and mingle. Some trees in their teens, as it
were, are very thrifty; others are old and decrepit.
In fact, the fortunes of the individual trees are much
like those of men and women in a human com-
munity — struggle, competition, defeat, decay, and
death on all sides. All, or nearly all, the evils that
afflict men have their counterpart in the evils that
afflict the trees of the forest. When some species of
forest worm threatens the destruction of our beech
or maple forests some other form of insect-life steps
in and puts an end to their increase, and the plague
vanishes. The gypsy and the brown-tailed moths
which have so ravished the groves and forests of the
Eastern States will doubtless in time be held in
check by their natural enemies. The plague of tent

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MEN AND TREES

caterpillars that got such headway in New York
State that it threatened to become a public calamity
was effectually checked by the cold and rain of the
May of 1917. Not one tent caterpillar have I seen
during the past three years. The plague of currant-
worms was checked in the same way. Sooner or later
any excess is sure to be corrected. But so far as we
can see, such things as the chestnut blight and hick-
ory blight must rage like a fire till they have spent
themselves and there are no more chestnut- or hick-
ory-trees to be destroyed. Throughout the course of
the biological history of the globe, both plants and
animals have dropped out in some such way, and
new forms come in — come in through the slow ac-
tion of the evolutionary impulse.

The Providence I see at work in the case of the
trees does not differ at all from the Providence I see
at work in the case of men. It is one and the same,
and that one is as I have so often said, wholesale,
indiscriminating, regardless of individuals, regard-
less of waste, delays, pain, suffering, failure, yet in-
suring success on a universal scale, the scale of cen-
turies and geologic periods. Our standards of time
compared with Nature’s standards are like our in-
terplanetary spaces compared with the inconceiva-
ble abysses of the sidereal heavens — minutes com-
pared to centuries. Our little family of planets
moves round the fireside of our little sun —a
small chimney-corner in the vast out-of-doors of

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astronomic space, where suns and systems and
whole universes of worlds drift like bubbles on the
sea. Give Nature time enough, and the world of to-
day, or of any day, becomes an entire stranger to
you. Orion will no longer stalk across the winter
skies, the pole-star will no longer guide your ships,
if, indeed, there remains any ocean for your ships to
sail upon.

The Natural Providence is not concerned about
you and me. In comparison it is concerned only
about our race, and not lastingly concerned about
that, since races, too, shall go.

**Races rise and fall,
Nations come and go;

Time doth gently cover all
With violets and with snow.”

As I sit here under an old heavy-topped apple-
tree on a hot midsummer day, a yellow leaf lets go
its hold upon the branch over my head and comes
softly down upon the open book I am reading. It is
a perfect leaf, but it has had its day. The huge fam-
ily of leaves of which it was a member are still rank
and green and active in sustaining the life of the
tree, but this one has dropped out of the leafy ranks.
There are a few small dark spots upon it, which,
I see with my pocket glass, are fungus growths,
or else some germ disease of apple-tree leaves, per-
haps, like pneumonia, or diphtheria, or tuberculosis
among men. One leaf out of ten thousand has fallen.

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MEN AND TREES

Was Fate cruel to it? From the point of view of the
leaf, yes — could a leaf have a point of view; from
the point of view of Nature, no. The tree has leaves
enough left to manufacture the needed chlorophy],
and that satisfies the law. If all the leaves were
blighted, or were swept off by insect enemies, or
stripped by hail and storm, that were a calamity to
the tree. But one leaf, though all the myriad forces
of Nature went to its production, though it is a
marvel of delicate structure and function, though
the sun’s rays have beaten upon it and used it, and
been kind to it, though evolution worked for untold
ages to bring its kind to perfection — what matters
it? It will go back into the soil and the air from
which it came, and contribute its mite to another
crop of leaves, and maybe it has rendered the mole-
cules of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen of which
it is composed more ready and willing to enter into
other living combinations. And the fungus germs
that have preyed upon it, they, too, have had their
period of activity, and have justified themselves.
Nature thus pits one form against another, and her
great drama of life and death goes on. Are her stakes
more in the one than in the other, since she favors
both? Yes, she has more at stake in health than in
disease. If disease always triumphed, all life would
go out. Of course, in the sum total of things, the life
of this old tree counts for but little, buit if it failed to
bear apples, its chief end would be defeated. Evil is
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

limited; it is a minor counter-current, but it is just
as real as the good; it is a phase of the good; we have
evil because we first have good. Both are relative
terms. We are prone to speak of good and evil as if
they were something absolute, like gravity or chemi-
cal affinity. But are they any more absolute than
heat and cold, or than big and little? What pleases
us, and is conducive to our well-being, we call good,
and its opposite we call evil. We are not to make our
wants and dislikes, our pleasures and our pain, the
measure of the universe, as we do mathematics and
physics. We can think of things in terms of art and
literature, of beauty or ugliness, or in terms of mo-
rality and religion, or we may think of them in terms
of science and of exact knowledge. When we say
they are good or bad, we are thinking of them in
terms of morals or of religion; when we say they are
beautiful or ugly, we are describing them in terms
of sesthetics; when we say they are true or false,
real or delusive, we are talking of them in terms of
science.

This sere and prematurely ripened leaf appeals to
my literary and imaginative faculties through its
beauty and its symbolic character; it appeals to my
understanding, my love of accurate knowledge, by
reason of the blight that caused its fall.

Our going out of the world seems equally fortui-
tous and haphazard in infancy, youth, middle life,
old age; before we have fairly lived, or after life has

180

‘MEN AND TREES

lost its value, or in the height of our powers, or in
the decrepitude of old age: which shall it be?

The naturist sees all life as a whole. Man is not an
exception, but part of the total scheme. The life
principle is the same ix him as in all else below him
— the principle that organizes matter into count-
less new forms; that crosses and uses the mechanical
and chemical forces, and begets numberless new
compounds; that develops organs and functions,
and separates the living world so sharply from the
non-living. In the weed, the tree, and in man, the
principle is the same. What has set up this organiz-
ing power and so impressed it that it goes on from
lower to higher forms, and unfolds the whole drama
of evolution through the geologic ages, is the mys-
tery of mysteries. To solve this mystery, mankind
invented God and acts of creation. But a God apart
from Nature is to me unthinkable, and science finds
no beginning of anything. It finds change, trans-
formation, only. When or where did man begin?
Where does the circle begin? Self-beginning — who
ean think of that? Can we think of a stick with only
one end? We can think of a motion as beginning and
ending, but not of substance as beginning and end-
ing. When the metabolism of the body ceases, death
comes. Do we think of life, or the organizing princi-
ple, as then leaving the body? It ceases, but does it
leave the body in any other sense than that the
flame leaves the candle when it is blown out? And is

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this any different in the case of man than it is in the
case of a tree or a dog? We postulate what we calla
soul in man, which we deny to all other forms of life
— an independent entity which separates from the
body and lives after it. But we run into difficulties
the moment we do so. In the biologic history of
man, when and where did the soul appear? Did the
men of the old Stone Age, of whom Professor Os-
born writes so graphically and convincingly, have
it? Did the Piltdown man, the Neanderthal man,
the Java man of Du Bois, have it? Did our ancestral
forms still lower down have it? Do babies have it?
Do idiots and half-witted persons have it?

All we can claim for man above the lower orders
is higher intelligence, greater brain power, the
power of reflection, and the logical process. His dog
has perceptive intelligence, but not reflective;
animals act from inherited impulse; man from 1m-
pulse, thought, ideation. Man’s instinctive impulses
are guided or restrained by thought; his emotions
— anger, love — wait upon thought; his migratory
instinct waits as that of the lower animals does not.
But when this extra power began, who can say?
It had no beginning, it dawned by insensible de-
grees, as do all things in Nature. We have only
to heighten our conception of Nature and matter
to see the difficulties vanish — and the stigma of
materialism loses its terrors. .

In these later centuries mankind has steadily

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MEN AND TREES

grown bolder and bolder in dealing with its deities
and its devils. A few heroic spirits have always
questioned the truth of the popular creeds, but in
our day a very large majority question or even deny
them. Fear of the wrath above or the wrath below
has fled. Men are fast coming to see that devotion
to the truth is the essence of true religion, and that
the worst form of irreligion is the acceptance of
creeds and forms without examining them, or upon
the sole authority of some book or sect. The truth-
loving man is the God-loving man. We no longer
talk of God-fearing men — this negative attitude
has given place to the positive attitude of love and
enjoyment. The wrath of God no longer makes us
tremble. The swift and sure vengeance of violated
law, both in the physical world without us and the
physiological world within us, we understand and
appreciate, but the fury and revenge of the offended
gods no longer disturb our dreams. Nature has no
mercy, is no respecter of persons, is one to the just
and the unjust. Only the moral nature of man
knows right from wrong; only the reason of man
knows truth from falsehood. When or how man got
this moral and intellectual ature is a question upon
which men themselves will never agree. Did it come
from without or from within — through evolution
or revelation? The naturalist or naturist is bound to
believe that it came from within through the long
process of evolution. Whatever favored man’s de-
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

a
velopment became a biological law and had sur-
vival value. Without some degree of right con-
duct and fair dealing — some degree of perception
of the true and the false — the race of man could
never have attained its present high position in the
scale of animate nature. Through some inherent im-
pulse or tendency in matter, man arose out of the
earth, climbing through the many lowly forms to his
full estate of a rational being. It has been.a long and
toilsome and painful journey. But here we are, and
‘when we look back through the geologie vistas we
are incredulous that we came that road. We in-
cline to the short cut through the Garden. But the
study of the ways of Nature as we see them in all
living things opens our eyes to the truth of evolu-
tion. Of course the great puzzle and mystery is, Who
or what stamped upon matter this organizing and
developing impulse and caused the first unicellular
life in the old Azoic or Palseozoic seas to branch and
grow and increase in complexity till it gave birth
to all the myriad living forms, high and low, that
now fill the earth? But here again I am using the
language of half-truth — the language of our ex-
perience, which makes us think of some external
agent as stamping an impulse upon matter. If we
say the impulse was always there, that it is insepara-
ble from matter and the laws of matter, just as
creation is without beginning and end, center or
circumference, we come no nearer speaking the un-
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MEN AND TREES

speakable. But it seems to me we do, in a measure,
satisfy the reason; we make it see or realize its own
limitations; reason guides reasor.

The infinite knows neither time nor space, neither
extension nor duration; it knows only the here and
the now. It does not wait for time to pass or for
eternity to begin. Eternity is now. Man, and all that
has arisen out of him, is a part of universal nature.
Are we not held to the sphere? Can we disturb it in
its orbit? Can we banish one atom from it or add
one atom to it? We are a fragment of it, its laws
pervade our minds, and we cannot get away from
the necessity of putting our thoughts and emotions
in the terms of our experience as dwellers upon this
astronomic globe. We may fancy that we get away
from it in moments of abstract thought, but we do
not; we do not get away from ourselves any more
than we can outrun our shadow. We can let our
imaginations course with the spheres that circle
through the abysmal depths of space, but we can
put our emotions only in the words that we have
invented to describe our experiences in this little
three-dimensional corner of creation. If our terms
were formed from our experiences amid the spheres,
we might be able to give some hint of the Infinite.
We might learn how to describe our sensations
when emancipated from the standards and limita-
tions of the world in which we live.

Conventionally religious persons shrink from

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

having their spiritual life discussed in terms of
psychology, because psychology smacks of science
and science acts like a blight upon religion. It dispels
mystery and lets the light of day —the garish,
irreligious day — into the twilight or the darkness
of religious emotion. We do not want our relation to
the spiritual world explained in terms of our com-
mon knowledge — such is our hankering after the
unknown, the mysterious, the transcendent.

One side of our nature fears the Infinite, and we
experience a chill when the methods of this world
obtrude themselves there. We have convinced our-
selves that the part of our inner life which we call
the soul is something more sacred and mysterious
and nearer to the Infinite than our ordinary facul-
ties. What victims we are of words! What is the
value of this feeling, and how did it arise? Our ap-
preciation of the beautiful, in art and nature, is
equally extra and transcends our practical faculties.
Man’s belief in another world — an ideal world of
the absolute good — is, of course, the result of his
strong reaction from the pain, the struggle, the in-
completeness of this world. Evolution is a hard road
to travel. Being born is evidently not a pleasant
experience for the baby, and in this world man is
constantly struggling through new experiences into
a higher and larger life. His measure of happiness is
never full and he looks for compensation in another
and better world. He does not see that there can be

186

MEN AND TREES

no better world — that pain and struggle and dis-
appointment are necessary for his development, and
that to long for a state in which these things do not
exist is like the stream longing for a dead equilib-
rium. All power and all growth come from a break
in the repose of the physical forces. There is no
power in a uniform temperature, nor in water at a
dead level. Mechanical power comes down an in-
cline, vital power is a lift on an up-grade — all
growing things struggle upward; the vegetable and
animal world lift the earth elements up against
gravity into an unstable equilibrium. Mechanical
things run down the scale toward a stable equilib-
rium.

Our life goes on by virtue of some principle or
force in matter that tends constantly to break up
the stable into the unstable, to force the elements
into new chemical combinations. Our machines
dissipate energy in doing work; the living body con-
serves energy in the same process. It grows strong
by the obstacles it overcomes, up to the limits of its
powers. The clock runs down, the energy we put
into it in winding it up is dissipated; but the growth
of a living body is a winding-up process, a drawing-
in and a storing-up process. In the wood and coal we
burn is stored up the heat of the sun. In burning
them and driving machinery by means of the heat
developed, the energy is dissipated. In manual
labor the human body dissipates energy also, and

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

it is the same solar energy that the engine dissipates,
and it does it in the same mechanical way; and it is
constantly replenished from without through the
food consumed. But the human or living engine
stokes itself. It is a clock that winds itself up, a
gun that loads and points itself. Because the living
body in its final analysis turns out to be a machine
as absolutely dependent upon mechanical and
chemical principles as any other machine, there are
those who see no radical difference between the
mechanical and the vital.

I conclude that it is equally up-grade from the
vital or physiological to the psychical. How the two
connect we can never ‘know, but that the think-
ing man dissipates energy there is no doubt. The
body and the soul are one in a way past our finding
out. When we discuss these things in terms of meta-
physics, we launch upon a boundless sea and reach
no real port.

When we project ourselves into Nature out of
which we came, or when we see ourselves there
objectively,— our virtues, our aspirations, our
vices, and our wickedness,—we sow the seeds of
our religion. We grow a crop of gods and of devils,
and heaven and hell become fixed realities to us. So
do we make the world in which we live, and it in
turn makes us. So does the divine in us keep pace
with the divine we see in Nature. So does the
beauty of our own characters grow as we see

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MEN AND TREES

beauty in the character of others. So do our love,
faith, hope, charity, develop and augment as we
see these things in the world abodt us. The uni-
verse is thus constituted, and that is all we can say
about it.

That right, human right, in the end and on a
large scale, prevails, I believe to be true; the right
that in long periods of time means, or rather secures,
the well-being of the race — the greatest good to the
greatest. number.

In discussing the final problems of the universe,
we are attempting to describe the Infinite in terms
of the finite — an impossible task. We think and
speak of God as a person, because our experience
gives us no other terms in which to conceive Him
except in terms of personality. He sees, hears, plans,
governs, creates, loves, suffers, is angry, we say, —
in fact, has all human attributes and characteristics
vastly magnified. He is an omnipotent and omni- -
present man. He is the creator and organizer and —
director of the universe, and hence is responsible
for everything in it, the evil as well as the good. Our
attitude toward Him is that of a subject toward his
sovereign, or toward a supreme judge. We must
praise, exalt, supplicate, propitiate Him. There is
lying upon my table a recent volume of sermons by
an English divine called “The Justification of God”
—his justification in the face of the terrible World
War which he might have prevented. Thus, just as

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“ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

soon as we conceive of God in terms of our human
nature, these baffling problems thrust themselves
upon us. We must seek some grounds upon which
we can excuse or vindicate or justify this supreme
man for permitting the terrible happenings which
darken the world. As this is not an easy task, men
say in their hearts, and often with their lips: “There
is no God.” Better no God than a being who would
permit the sin and suffering we see daily all about
us, and that history reveals to us.

The only alternative I see is to conceive of God in
terms of universal Nature—a nature God in whom
we really live and move and have our being, with
whom our relation is as intimate and constant as
that of the babe in its mother’s womb, or the apple
upon the bough. This is the God that science and
reason reveal to us — the God we touch with our
hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and
from whom there is no escape — a God whom we
serve and please by works and not by words, whose
worship is deeds, and whose justification is in ad-
justing ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves
of his bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting
to everlasting. Of course in the light of the old theol-
ogy this is no God at all. It was to emancipate us
from the rule of this God that the old conceptions
of a being above and far removed from Nature were
formulated. Nature is carnal and unholy. Our
theory compels us to say to matter and the laws of

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MEN AND TREES

matter, ““Get thee behind me, Satan.” We struggle
and suffer in this debasing world for a season, and
then escape from it to a higher and better one. In
all the dark, prescientific ages during our own era
— dark in regard to man’s real relation to the
universe in which he finds himself, but often lumi-
nous with flashes of insight into the nature of man
himself — these conceptions ruled man’s religious
aspirations. In our own times they still largely rule
in various modified forms. The old theological
dogmas are more or less discredited, but a religion
founded upon science makes little headway with
the average man. We are shaping our practical
lives — our business, our social, our economical
relations, more and more according to scientific
deductions. We seek more and more a scientific or
naturalistic basis for our rules of conduct, for our
altruism, for our charitable organizations, for our
whole ethical system. Any principle that squares
with natural law is indeed founded upon a rock.
The stars in their courses fight for the cause that is
founded upon natural right, which in human rela-
tions does not mean the right of the strong to
trample upon the weak, but the right of all to their
full measure of free development.

Right and wrong are, of course, finite terms, and
apply only in the human sphere. Universal Nature,
as it appears among non-living bodies and forces,
knows neither right nor wrong; it knows only

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

might. As it appears among the orders below man,
it knows neither right nor wrong. Physics and chem-
istry have no consciousness; neither have beasts or
bacteria; but man has, and this fact will in time
determine the whole course of human history.
Naturalism makes for righteousness, or right-
mindedness, as surely as it makes for health and
longevity.

/

XII
‘THE PROBLEM OF EVIL '

I

OW has the problem of evil tried men’s souls!

How have their gods failed to live up to the
character they have given them! How have they
confused our moral standards! The trouble lies in a
misconception of the nature of evil, and in a false
idea of the universe itself.

There is no problem of evil until we have made or
imagined an unnatural and impossible world. When
we have enthroned in the universe a powerful man-
made God who is the embodiment of all we call
good and the contemner of all we call evil, then we
have our insoluble problem. To help ourselves out
we invent another being who is the embodiment of
all we call evil and enthrone him in regions below.
Upon him we saddle the evil, and thus we try to
run the universe with these two antagonistic prin-
ciples yoked together, and no end of confusion in
our religious ideas results.

The moment we postulate an all-loving, all-
merciful, all-wise, and just being to rule the affairs
of this world, and place him in such intimate re-
lations with it that not a sparrow falls to the ground
without his will and cognizance, then, indeed, are we

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

in troubled waters and have lost our reckoning. We
cannot excuse such being on the ground that his
ways are inscrutable and past finding out. A
creator who sends into the world the malformed, the
half-witted, the bestial, the naturally depraved, and
then holds them to high ethical standards, is con-
demned by the ideals which he has implanted with-
In us.

Now the naturalist has no such trouble. He sees
that good and evil are only relative terms; that
they both grow on the same tree; that we should
not know good were there no evil; that there would
be no development were there not what we call evil.
Pain and suffering are inseparable from the human
lot. They are a part of the price we pay for our
place in the world. All struggle we look upon as
evil. Disease, failure, death are looked upon as evil,
but they are conditions of our lives. Through sick-
ness we learn the laws of health. The lower ani-
mals have no such troubles—no sickness, intem-_
perance, or war or avarice. They know without
reason how to live, but man has reason, and the joy
of its exercise and the peril of its failure. Are we
not all willing to pay the price? — to take it on
these terms rather than to change places with the
brutes?

What a troublesome time the good orthodox
brethren have with their God! He does, or per-
mits such terrible things. Only yesterday He sent a

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THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

cyclone through the State of Illinois that killed hun-
dreds of innocent persons, and destroyed hundreds
of peaceful homes, wiping out at one blow the re-
sults of long years of human labor. A few years ago
He sent or permitted the scourge of infantile paraly-
sis that desolated tens of thousands of homes and
left a trail of thousands of crippled and enfeebled
children. Again He sent or permitted the influenza
to sweep over the land, claiming more victims than
did the Great War; and so on. How our fathers,
rocked in the cradle of the old creeds, wrestled with
this problem! How could a paternal and all-loving
God do these things? The naturalist reads nature
differently. His god is no better than Nature. In
fact, his god and Nature are one and inseparable.
Nature goes her way and her ways are not our ways.
We take our chances in the clash and war of physical
forces. They have developed us and made us what
we are.

It was only a few years ago that the President
of the United States asked all good people to as-
semble in their respective places of worship and
pray to God to stop the tornado of war and crime
that was then devastating Europe. Is it possible to
conceive of a being anywhere in the universe, with
power to stop such a world calamity, who would
complacently look on and wait till the sufferers could
unite in a petition to him? What a false man-made
god such a conception holds up to us! No wonder the

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

World War shattered this conception in thousands
of minds, and left them without any faith at all!

Rogers said in regard to evil that Sir John
Mackintosh and Malthus and another philosopher
whose name has escaped me, all agreed that the
attributes of the deity must be in some respects
limited, else there would be no sin and misery in
the world.

We use the words “good”’ and “ evil” in anarrow,
personal sense. To the farmer the frost that blights
his crops is an evil, but not to the squirrels who are
waiting for the nuts to fall, or to the man who suf-
fers from hay fever. Rain is a blessing, but how
easily it becomes a curse! A cold wet spring cuts
off the insect pests, but delays the plowing and
planting. It is hard on the insectivorous birds, but
the plants and trees profit. The grasshoppers that
eat up the farmer’s pasturage make good eke
for his flock of turkeys.

Blight and struggle, frost and drought, weed out
the weaklings and beget a hardier race.

Moral evil — intemperance, avarice, war, lying,
cheating — are on another plane. They are peculiar
to man. Nature below him knows them not. But as
they are against nature, they perpetually tend to
correct themselves. The business world has learned
that honesty is the best policy. Cheating is un-
popular because, in the long run, it does not pay.

The most aggressive and warlike nation upon the

196

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

globe has at last got its eyes open to the evils of
militarism, and has bought its emancipation at a
heavy price. Tyranny and oppression are finally
doomed by the nature of man. Nature’s ways are
roundabout, and often regardless of cost. The chaos
and waste and suffering in Europe to-day are in
keeping with her spendthrift methods. She knows
that the most turbulent and muddy stream will
clear itself and quiet down. The track of the cyclone
through the forest will in time entirely disappear.
Evil perishes, the good increases more and more.
God is not so bad as we paint him, and we have no
need of a devil. All is good. Gravity would glue
our feet to the ground and we have to defeat it
every time we lift a foot, and yet how could we
walk or work without gravity? The bad, or the evil,
dogs one’s footsteps, but it teaches us circumspec-
tion, and to beware of dangerous paths.

How easy to put one’s finger on this or that and
say, “Here are positive evils!” —all diseases,
smallpox, infantile paralysis, influenza, and so on —
but they are only remote contingencies, and, on
the whole, most of us find life good. There are good
germs and there are bad germs, but the good vastly
predominate. And the bad germs are only bad
from our point of view. Our doors and windows let
in the cold or the heat, as the case may be. We have
them on these conditions. Fruits and grains nour-
ish us, but they may injure us also.

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2

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

In 1916 my naturalist’s faith prompted me to
write thus of the World War: Two world forces are
at death grips in this war. In terms of government
it is autocracy against democracy; in terms of
biology it is the unfit against the fit; in terms of
man’s moral nature it is might against right. What-
ever triumph Prussian aggressiveness and ruth-
lessness may meet with, they must in time meet
with defeat, else Evolution has miscarried, and its
latest and highest product, man’s moral nature,
is, in its survival value, but dust and ashes.

II

THERE is positive good and there is negative good.
We may say of health that it is a positive good, and
of sickness that it is a negative good, because it re-
veals to us the conditions of health. In disease the
body is struggling to regain its health — to recover
and retain its normal condition. Its well-being is
the result of a certain balance between contending
forces. What we call the hostile forces appear only as
the result of wrong living. The lower animals have
none of our distempers because they live according
to nature. Cattle do not get rheumatism by lying
upon the wet, cold ground, nor pneumonia from ex-
posure to cold and storm. In the freedom of the
fields and woods it is quite certain that they would
never become infected with tuberculosis. I doubt
if the wild dog or the wolf ever have dog distemper,
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THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

or if wild horses ever have crib-bite. Disease, as we
know it, is a product of civilization.

Death, of course, is not an evil when it comes in
the regular course of nature; it is an evil when it
comes prematurely. The various social evils tend to
correct themselves. Moral evils — lying, cheating,
selfishness, uncharitableness — also tend to correct
themselves. Righteousness exalteth a nation be-
cause righteousness has great survival value. The
unrighteousness of Germany caused her final down-
fall. In an earlier age, when ethical standards were
lower, she might have succeeded in dominating
Europe. Our susceptibility to pain is not an evil
inasmuch as it safeguards us against a thousand
dangers. What I would say in a score of ways is
that there is no evil in the human world not of our
own making. Plagues and famines are always the
result of human folly or short-sightedness. Filth
breeds disease. Typhoid fever is a filth disease and
is preventable. There is no god to blame for our dis-
tempers. Nature’s hands are clean. The wind is
never tempered to the shorn lamb, in spite of the
proverb, but the shorn lamb has not been fleeced
by Nature. A heavy snowfall is an evil in towns and
cities, but a good thing for the country. It enables
the meadow mice to girdle the apple-trees, but
it is a coverlid that greatly profits the meadows
themselves. It is therefore good to both mice and
meadows.

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Our greatest philosopher, William James, had a
wide grasp of fundamental questions, but it seems
to me that he did not fully grasp the problem of
evil; he saw the universe asa dual universe, two prin-
ciples, good and evil, struggling with each other.
He seemed to look upon good and evil as positive
entities in themselves, whereas naturalism sees in
them only names which we give to our experiences
with objects and conditions in this world. What
favors us, as I have so often said, we call good, and
what antagonizes we call evil; but absolute good
and absolute evil do not exist, any more than do
absolute up and down; or absolute near and far.
The absolute admits of no degrees, but there are all
degrees of good and bad. Some hostile germs are
worse than others, and some friendly germs are
better than others. Again I say, we live in a world
of relativity.

Naturalism does not see two immeasurable
realities, God and Nature, it sees only one, that all
is Nature or all is God, just as you prefer.

James was fond of quoting Walt Whitman, but
he does not see, as Whitman did, that there is no
evil, or, if there is, that it is just as necessary as the
so-called good. From James’s point of view Na-
ture is a harlot to whom we owe no allegiance, and
another world is demanded to correct and com-
pensate the failures and disappointments of this.

Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God

200

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

who made the heaven and the earth, and who on
looking upon them said that they were very good.
Here is where the trouble begins — a Creator apart
from the universe who looks upon and approves
the work of his hands. This is the early, childish
view of mankind. As Bergson says, when we apply
to the universe our idea of a maker and a thing
made, trouble begins. The universe was not made;
it 7s, and always has been. God is Nature, and
Nature is God. If this is pantheism, then we are in
good company, for Goethe said that as a philosopher
he was a pantheist. Even the atheist has a god of
his own. He knows that there is something back of
him greater than he is.

Most persons are pantheists without knowing it.
Ask any of the good orthodox folk what God is,
and they will say that He is a spirit. Ask them
where He is, and they will answer, He is here,
there, everywhere, in you and in me. And this is
pantheism — all god — cosmotheism.

“Truly all that we know of good and duty pro-
ceeds from Nature; but, none the less so, all that
we know of evil.”

“If there be a divine spirit of the universe, Na-
ture, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its
ultimate word to man,” says James. But does he
not see that this term “divine spirit” is born of
man’s narrowness and partiality; that Nature is all
of one stuff, divine or diabolical, just as we elect?

20)

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Ale says that the naturalistic superstition, the wor-
ship of God in nature, has begun to lose its hold
upon the educated mind; that the first step toward
getting into healthy relations with the universe is
the act of rebellion against the God of nature.

Poor James Thomson, the British poet whose
pessimism, perhaps, caused him to commit suicide,
whom our James loves to quote, hurled his scorn
at a fiction of his own brain when he wrote:

‘“‘Not for all thy power, furled or unfurled,
For all thy temples to thy glory built,
Would I assume the ignominious guilt
Of having made such men in such a world.”

The whole value of philosophy is to help us to a
rational view of the universe, and when it fails to
do this, it falls short of fulfilling its proper function.
The contradictions of which James speaks do not
disturb the naturalist at all. Nature would not be
Nature without these contradictions ; they do not
disturb the unity of Nature.

Empedocles taught that “there is no real crea-
tion or annihilation in the universal round of things,
but an eternal mixing — due to the two eternal
powers, Love and Hate — of one world-stuff in its
sum unalterable and eternal.” And Whitman’s
large lines mean the same thing:

“There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now, |
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” —

XIII
HORIZON LINES

I, THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

N dealing with fundamental questions like the

origin of life, how prone our natural philosophers
are to assume the existence of that which they set
out to prove. Thus Pfliigler assumes living protein
in the shape of a cyanogen radical, and assumes
that this radical possesses a large amount of inter-
nal energy, and thus “introduces into the living
matter energetic internal motion.” As cyanogen
and its compounds arise only in incandescent
heat, he concludes that life is derived from fire,
that its germ was in the earth when it was still an
incandescent ball.

**As soon as oxides can be there,” says Moore,
“oxides appear.” “When temperature admits of
carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed.”
But are oxides and carbonates mere fortuitous
compounds — just chance hits? Moore helps him-
self out by formulating what he calls the “Law of
Complexity,” a law that holds throughout all space.
But is the law, again, fortuitous? Is it not rather
organized intelligence? “Atoms, molecules, colloids,
and living organisms arise as a result of the opera-
tion of this law.” Allen says, “Life arose at the

203

BJ

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

period when the physical conditions of the earth
came to be nearly what they are at present.” Of
course. But is not this begging the question? We
do not know life apart from these conditions; hence
we assume that the conditions beget the life.

What is life anyhow? May we not say that it is a
new motion in matter? It does not introduce a new
chemistry, or a new physics, but it uses these to
new ends. New and unstable compounds arise.
Solar energy, says Allen, acting on various carbon
and nitrogen compounds, would set up various
anabolic and catabolic reactions which resulted in
life — life of a very humble and rudimentary form,
but life.

Troland gets life from the enzymes, but how
does he get his enzymes? He assumes that at some
moment in the earth’s history a small amount of a
certain autocatalytic enzyme —a self-created en-
zyme — suddenly appeared at a definite time and
place within the yet warm ocean waters which con-
tained in solution various substances reacting very
slowly to produce an oily liquid immiscible with
water. Troland postulates the auto- or self-catalytic
character of the initial enzyme, which is virtually
postulating the life-impulse itself.

Osborn, in his work on the “ Origin and Evolu-
tion of Life,” also virtually starts by assuming that
which he sets out to prove. He suggests that the
initial step in the origin of life was the codrdinating

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HORIZON LINES

and bringing together of the then primordial ele-
ments of water, nitrates, and carbon dioxide, “‘ which
so far as we know had never been in combined action
before.”” Was their coming together a blind, for-
tuitous affair? Osborn assumes that these elements
were gradually bound by a new form of mutual
attraction “‘out of which arose a new form of unity
in the cosmos, an organic unity or organism. It
was an application of energy new to the cosmos. In
fact it was life.”’ “When the earth had in the course
of its physical evolution become adapted as the
abode of life, living substances came into being.”’
By their own independent action, or by what?

In trying to account for happenings on the earth’s
surface, we follow the chain of cause and effect.
But when we try to explain origins, we are dealing
with a chain which has only one end.

Picted, a Swiss scientist, concluded that because
all chemical action of the kind which goes on in
living things is annihilated at one hundred degrees
below zero Centigrade, therefore chemical action
and life are one. But chemical action is as old as
the earth. Is life as old?

II. THE LIVING AND NON-LIVING WORLDS
I rancy I am not alone in having difficulty in
uniting the two worlds — the living and the non-
living — and in seeing them under the same law.
In the one I see something like mind and pur-
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

pose; every living thing shows something for which
we have no name but intelligence. Organization
demands an organizing principle. There is purpose
in the wings of a bird, the legs of an animal, the
fins of a fish, but where is there purpose in the orbs,
in the comets, in the meteors? Or, to come down to
the earth, where is there purpose in the mountains,
in the stratified rocks, in the ocean, or in the air
currents?

In a living body there are organs which function;
in a non-living, there are parts which act and are
acted upon. To see mind in all is the task — to see
in gravity, in cohesion, in chemical affinity, in disso-
lution, anything at work akin to ourselves. We see
irrefragable law; we see the sequence of cause and
effect; we see the weather system work itself out —
evaporation, condensation, precipitation, resulting
in clouds, rainfall, springs, streams, lakes, and seas;
we see the never-failing succession of the seasons; we
see the law of the conservation of force; but do all
these things imply the same intelligence, though
unconscious, which we see in the sitting bird, or in
the growing plant or tree? Is the cosmic order akin
to the vital order? Of course mechanics and chemis-
try are one the universe over; atoms and molecules:
are atoms and molecules; but where does mind end,
and law begin? Or, is it all law, or all mind, accord-
ing to our point of view? The moral order, which is
man’s order, we know has its limits, but I am try-

206

HORIZON LINES

ing to see if the rational order is coexistent with
nature. The unity we seek we may find in the old
conception of God, but this saddles all the turmoil
and disorder and evil of the world upon an all-
wise, all-good Being.

Shall we adopt the idea of a primal mind as dis-
tinct from the human mind, as the poets do? I
grasp at anything that will help me see that I am
akin to the farthest star, in my mind as in my body.
Icannot think of a dual or a divided universe. I
want to see myself as strung upon the same thread
as all the rest of nature.

In organic evolution I see the workings of the
creative impulse — or growth, as opposed to mere
accretion or accumulation. In the light of the same
law does one not see worlds and suns potential in
the spiral nebulz? Science helps us to see the evolu-
tion of the chemical elements, or to follow up this
defining and differentiating process. Could we fly
to the uttermost parts of the heavens, we should
find the Cosmic Mind there before us.

III. THE ORGANIZING TENDENCY
Is it possible to think of any ingenious contrivance
in nature as the result of chance, or of the fortuitous
clashing and jostling of the elements? Living things
are full of these ingenious contrivances which serve
a definite end and keep life going. In the inorganic
world there are no such contrivances; there is not
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

the simplest bit of machinery — parts adjusted
to parts, and the whole adjusted to some specific
end. In all the clashing and jostling of bodies and
forces through all the astronomic and geologic
ages, not so much as the simplest mechanical de-
vice — a coiled spring or a carpenter’s hammer
—has been struck out, and never can be. It is true
that there are certain static conditions of mat-
ter that suggest design — natural bridges, natural
obelisks, rude architectural and monumental struc-
tures, and human profiles on the rocks; but these
are not the result of a constructive process, of a
building-up, but the result of degradation: the ero-
sive forces carve them out in obedience to the laws
of matter and energy. We easily see how it all came
about; and we can guide these forces so that they
will repeat the process. But we do not see how the
living body, with all its marvelous adjustments and
codrdinations, came about, and we cannot manipu-
late matter so as to produce the simplest living
thing. Darwinians profess to see in natural selec-
tion — which is simply a name for an eliminating or
sifting process — the explanation of even man him-
self. But the elimination of the weaker forms, which
has gone on for whole geologic ages — for example,
in the Grand Cafion of the Colorado — has not
resulted in so much as one perfect, four-square
foundation, or one perfect flying arch. Natural se-
lection is not a creative, but a purely mechanical,
208

~HORIZON LINES

process. We involuntarily personify it, and think of
it as involving will and power of choice; think of it
as selecting this and that, as a man does when he
weeds his garden or selects his seeds, or breeds his
animals. But it is not positive at all. It is negative —
a dropping-out process.

Chance, or chance selection, works alike in the
organic and the inorganic realms, but it develops no
new forms in the inorganic, because there is no prin-
ciple of development, no organizing push. But in
organized matter there is, in and behind all this or-
ganizing, a developing principle or tendency; the
living force is striving toward other forms; in other
words, development occurs because there is some-
thing to develop. An acorn develops, but a quartz
pebble only changes.

The living body is placed in a world of non-living
bodies and forces, and it takes its chances; it devel-
ops only by their aid; if warmth and moisture are
withheld, it ceases to develop; or, if warmth and
moisture are in excess, it ceases to develop; its well-
being is insured when it rides the inorganic forces,
and is not ridden by them. It is subject to the law of
chance of the world in which it is placed, but that
law of chance does not explain its origin or its de-
velopment as it does that of the non-living forms.

That it is all the result of design or purpose of an
all-wise Being, working his will upon matter, is

equally unthinkable. Yet if it is the result of chance,
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

then the world of mind and soul is only a phase of
mechanics and chemistry. In that case the head of a
Paul or a Homer is no greater wonder than a vol-
canic bomb, having essentially the same origin. If
we regard it as the work of design, we are compelled
to saddle all the sin and misery, all the delays and
failures and wastes of the geologic ages, upon In-
finite Wisdom and Goodness, together with all the
famine and pestilence and carnage and miscarriages
of history.

For untold millions of years the earth was given
up to low, groveling, all but brainless, bestial forms,
devouring and devoured; for other untold millions
it was the scene of a carnival of terrible dragon-like
monsters — in the sea, on the earth, and in the air
— a tragedy of monstrous forms enacted upon an
unstable stage that rose and sank or was over-
whelmed by fire and flood. For other long ages it
was the scene of ape-like creatures struggling to be
man, living in caves, contending with savage beasts,
hirsute, forbidding, living by tooth and claw and
muscular strength more than by wit, followed by the
long historical period during which man appeared
and has fought his way to his present stage of de-
velopment, through blood and carnage and suffering
and misdirected activities, dogged by all the evil
and destructive passions, obstructed and thwarted,
cut off by plagues and wars, engulfed by earth-
quakes, devoured by fire and flood, blinded by his

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own ignorance, consumed by his own evil passions,
yet making steady progress toward the position
which he now holds in the animal kingdom.

IV. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM

Tue bogey of teleology frightens a good many
honest scientific minds. To recognize anything akin
to intelligence in nature, or to believe that a uni-
versal mind is immanent in, or a part of, the cosmos,
is looked upon as disloyalty to the scientific spirit.

Lamarck’s idea of an indwelling directing princi-
ple in organic evolution discredited him with Dar-
win, and with the leading biologists since his time.
Yet Darwin said he could not look upon the uni-
verse as the result of chance. But he faltered be-
fore the other alternative — that any will or design
lay back of it.

It is unfortunate that these words connote things
purely human, and to that extent are likely to lead
us astray. But are not all our terms human, even
the word “astray” itself? Can we have any other?
Emerson says that anything may be affirmed or de-
nied of the Infinite, and that God can be hinted only _
in signs and symbols. In trying to describe time, we _
need a new language that differs as much from our
ordinary speech as algebra differs from arithmetic.
The circle and sphere are the only complete types of
Infinity.

In Professor Loeb’s mechanistic conception of life

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“there is no hint of mind or soul; all is matter and
force. All the mechanists and energists and materi-
alists unconsciously endow their matter and force
with creative power, thus elevating them to the
rank of a Deus.

Science knows no mysteries; it knows only insolu-
ble problems and comparatively few of them. But
may not one see mysteries in nature without being a
mystic? Physical facts may be inexplicable, but we
do not call them mysteries. The birth and develop-
ment of the cell is wonderful, but can we say that it
is mysterious? Does not mystery imply something
occult and unknowable? Is a biologist or evolution-
ist to be charged with mysticism because he refuses
to admit that the development of species is all a
matter of chance? If he believes, for instance, that
the horse as we know him was inevitable in that
small beast of Eocene times, the eohippus, is he to
be charged with a teleological taint? Or if we speak
of the predestined course of evolution are we un-
faithful to the true scientific spirit? Is not the acorn
predestined to become an oak? Does growth imply a
mysterious guiding force or principle? The little
brown house wren that fusses and chatters here
around its box on my porch has come all the way
from Central America. Did something guide it?
Life is full of this kind of guidance. Not much of na-
ture can be explained by addition and subtraction;
not much of it can be explained by mere mechanics,

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or physics; not much of it can be explained by the
doctrine of chance. There are reasons behind rea-
sons. You may give good physiological reasons why
the heart beats, why the liver secretes bile, why th2
digestive processes go on and our food nourishes us,
but can you find the mind by dissecting the brain or
connect mind with matter?

Mysticism belongs to the sphere of our religious
emotions, and when we read natural phenomena
through these emotions we are mystical. We cannot
say that the course of evolution has been directed,
and we cannot say it goes by chance. The changes of
the seasons are not directed; the circuit of the wa-
ters from the earth, through the sea to the clouds
and back to the earth, is not directed; the orbs in
their courses are not directed; the sap in the trees,
the blood in our veins, are not directed; neither are
these things by chance. “An inward perfecting
principle” is the divinity that shapes the ends of all
organisms.

Many scientific men are so shy of teleology that
they tend to the other extreme and land in a world
of chance.

Now, if man and all the other forms of life are the
result of chance, then Chance is a very good god and
should be written with a capital. No matter what
we call the power out of which the universe flows, or
with which it is identified, it is a veritable Deus.

We cannot affirm that we are the result of chance,

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nor the result of design, as we use these words in our
daily lives. These words apply to parts and frag-
ments of which our lives are made up. They do not
help us in dealing with the whole. We share in the
life of the universe; we are a part of it, and what
keeps it going keeps us going. What set evolution on
foot and evolved the organic from the inorganic is
the parent of us all. It is not we that are immortal;
it is life, and the universe. We pass like shadows, but
the sun remains — for a season. We say of a thing,
or an event, that it came by chance, when we see no
will like unto our own directing it; at the same time
we know that the laws of matter and force control
everything. Not a sparrow falls to the ground with-
out their immutable decrees. In the same sense the
hairs of our heads are numbered.

When we discuss or describe the universe in terms
of experience, we are dealing in half-truths. We can-
not describe a sphere in terms of angles and right
lines; no more can we describe or interpret the All in
terms of our own experience. —

If it were Chance, or Darwin’s Natural Selection,
or orthogenesis, or whatever it was, that brought
me and all other forms of life here, that gave me my
mind and body, that put my two eyes and my two
ears just where they are of most service to me, and
my two arms and hands, and my two legs and
feet, and all my internal organs, my double circu-
lation, my heart to pump the blood and keep the

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vital machinery going, my secretions and my ex-
cretions, my lungs to lay hold of the air and purify
the blood, my liver and kidneys to eliminate the
poisons and effete matter, my marvelous diges-
tive system to furnish the fuel that generates the
physical power, and, more than all these things,
that looked after my germ in the old Cambrian
seas and brought it safely down through the haz-
ards of the long road of evolution and developed
it and made me a man, and gave me the capacity
to contemplate and enjoy this amazing universe —
the power or the blind force or the law of chance,
I say, that could do all this is god enough for me. I
want no other.

Do we expect to see the Natural Providence at
work as we see man at work? Nature works from the
inside. In the human sphere there is a maker and a
thing made. Not so in the universe. Things are in
their place without being made. Our concepts of the
beginning and the end do not apply to them. The
words “‘chance” and “design” are born of our lim-
ited knowledge.

That man or an ant or a leaf or a flower could re-
sult from the haphazard jostling together of the
molecules of matter, or the units of force, is un-
thinkable. Could one get an intelligent sentence, or
one’s own name, by putting the letters of the print-
er’s type in a hat and shaking them up till the crack
of doom? — an old and trite comparison, but it

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seems to state the case fairly. And yet, how can a
naturalist fall back upon teleology? Is not Nature
sufficient unto herself? Must we inject our own little
methods and makeshifts into the ways of the Eter-
nal? We might as well try to walk off the sphere as
try to compass this problem in the terms of our
own experience. The inscrutable, the unthinkable,
the unknowable, confront us on all sides.

So far as I can see the Creative Energy in nature
has no plan nor end. Plans are the ways of the finite,
not of the Infinite. Man alone has plans and ends.
The Infinite cannot be defined or interpreted in
terms of our human lives. It transcends all speech.
To name any one thing as the purpose and end of
creation is like naming the end of a sphere, or the
direction of a circle, All bodies with which we deal
on the earth have an upper and an under side, but
the earth itself is all top side; there is no under side,
though the orbs in the heavens, to our eye, have a
lowest point or bottom side. Every tangible body
with which we deal rests upon some other body, but
the orbs float in vacuity. The irregular solid bodies
with which we deal have three dimensions — length,
breadth, and thickness — but, properly speaking,
the sphere has none of these; it has only mass.

When we discuss or attempt to describe what we
call God, or what I call the Eternal, in terms of man,
as the theologians do, something within us rises up
and says, No. A magnified man, or a man raised to

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the nth power, is not God; he is still man. I fancy
that with most men the denial of a God means sim-
ply this: there is no God who can be described in the
terms usually employed. One is an atheist because
he cannot accept a God made in man’s image. It be-
littles the Mystery. Our belief in God is so radical
that we reject half-gods. The fatherhood of God
means no more than the manhood of God, or the
governorship, or the judgeship, of God. ;

In many respects the manlike God falls below his

human prototype, being more cruel than any hu-
man being dares to be.
No, we cannot measure the Infinite Mystery with
our foot-rule. Boundless space is the negation of
space. We can say that there is no space in the sense
that we can say that there is no God. There is no
motion unless there is something at rest; there is no
Infinite Good unless there is Infinite Evil. Hence we
have invented a hell to balance heaven, a Devil to
ofiset God.

The universe is a reality, though we cannot define
it. Life goes on, though we cannot account for it.
Boundless space exists, though words fail us in the
attempt to fathom it. The earth has its center,
though we do not know whether we should be stand-
ing on our heads or our heels were we to reach it.
Heavenly bodies do collide, though we cannot visu-
alize the collision. Our language fails us when we
come to the ultimate questions.

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That this is the best possible world, humanly
speaking, I have no doubt, yet sin and misery are
on every hand. Sin and misery are terms of our
own which simply express some of the conditions of
our development. They are like the terms “up”
and ‘“‘down,” “‘east” and “‘ west,” and “near” and
‘far’; they are relative. Nature knows no good and
no bad; all is good; that is, all favors development.
The rivers reach the sea, no matter what the obsta-
cles in the way. The seasons come and go, no matter
how delayed.

Nature’s ends, so far as we can name them, are
wholesale — to keep the game going, to heap the
measure, to play one hand against the other. She is
more solicitous about the race than about the indi-
vidual. The wreck of worlds or suns in sidereal space
matters little; there are infinite worlds and suns left.
What would really matter would be failure of celes-
tial mechanics. The eclipse of the sun and the moon
occurring exactly on time, “‘ without the untruth of
a single second,” tells how perfectly the great ma-
chine runs. The eclipse itself is an accident, but a
harmless one; it is not a necessity in the movements
of our system.

If man is the end of things, as we would fain be-
lieve, then why was he so long a-coming? Why will
he as surely disappear from the earth? Why has he
not come to other planets in our system? When he
disappears from our solar system, will not the great

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procession go on just the same without him? No
doubt of it. He is only an incident, and maybe an
accident — a lucky throw of the dice.

Vv. IS THERE DESIGN IN NATURE?

WE cannot put to Nature the direct questions we
put to ourselves. Namable purposes and designs rule
our lives. Not so with the All. I told Father Good-
man the other day, much to his bewilderment, that
I did not think the air was made for us to breathe,
nor the water for us to drink, nor food for us to eat.
We breathe and drink and eat because our organiza-
tion is adjusted to these things. The shoe is made
over the last, not the last to fit the shoe. The organi-
zation is fitted, or fits itself, to its environment. Na-
ture is first, man is afterwards. Is the notch in the
mountain made for the road to go through? Is the
land-locked harbor made to protect our shipping?
Would it not be as true to say that the wind was
made to fill the ship’s sails, as that air was made to
fill our lungs? In dealing with this question of design
many persons get the cart before the horse.

Of course there is purpose or design in living
things in a sense that there is not in the non-living.
Every part of a living organization is purposeful.
There is purpose in our lungs, our hearts, our kid-
neys, in short in every part of our bodies. There is
purpose in the varnish on leaves, in the down and
resin on buds, in the wings and hooks of seeds, in the

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colors of flowers and of animals, in fact, in every-
thing that makes for the well-being of living things.
But not in the same sense is there purpose in the
wind, the rain, the snow, the tides, the heat, the
cold, the rocks, the soil, the fountains. Animate na-
ture struggles; inanimate nature passively submits.
Dead matter forever seeks an equilibrium; living
matter forever struggles against an equilibrium.
The waters separate the clay and the sand and the
pebbles from the soil and deposit each in its own
place; but it is not a struggle or an effort; it is me-
chanical adjustment. It is not an effort for certain
liquids to form crystals, or for certain elements to
combine with certain other elements and form new
compounds, but it is an effort for a tree to resist the
wind, to lift up tons of water and minerals against
gravity, to force its roots through the soil or grip
the rock, and it is an effort for the mother to bear
and nurse her young. For anything to live and grow,
effort is needful; not commonly a painful effort, but
a joyous one.

So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we
must make clear what part or phase of Nature we
refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as a whole
shows any design in our human sense of the word? I
think not. The Eternal has no purpose that our lan-
guage can compass. There can be neither center nor
circumference to the Infinite. The distribution of
land and water on the globe cannot be the result of

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design any more than can the shapes of the hills and
mountains, or Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s moons.
The circular forms and orbits of the universe must
be the result of the laws of matter and force that
prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final
solution of the riddle, but is as near as we can come
to it. One question stands on another question, and
that on another, and so on, and the bottom question
we can never reach and formulate. The earth rests
on nothing and floats as lightly as a feather. All
matter is probably only a phase of the ether, but the
ether defies all proof and all negation.

How quickly we get where no step can be taken!
We cannot step off the planet, though we may step
off from every object on its surface. There is no heat
in sunlight till it reaches the earth; heat is an experi-
ence of our bodies, and beings on the remotest plan-
ets, if there are any, may and must receive adequate
heat, and beings on Mercury and Venus no more.
Terrestrial physics and celestial physics must be the
same, and yet celestial mechanics find no place on
the surface of our planet. The laws of the cosmos
bring to naught our mundane conceptions. Where
are up and down, east and west, over and under, out
in sidereal space? We balk at perpetual motion, yet
in the heavens, and in the interior of matter, behold
perpetual motion! Behold motion without friction
and energy without waste or dissipation! On the
earth every visible body rests on some other body,

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everything has a beginning and an end, but where is
the beginning or the ending of the cosmos? Where,
then, in this quest do we touch bottom? Nowhere.
There is no bottom. Only measurable, finite things
have bottoms and bounds. The immeasurable, the
Infinite, is over us and under us, and our lives are
like sparks against the night. But, just as we live in
the heavens and do not know it, so we live and move
and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off;
it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from
it as from gravity. ar

We are not like beings who have moved into a
house, made and furnished and provisioned in antici-
pation of our coming. We are creatures born in a
house, or amid an environment to which we must
slowly and more or less painfully fit ourselves. We
are the consequent, not the antecedent. In a differ-
ent world we should have been differently consti-
tuted. In a bigger world no doubt our bodies would
have been bigger and our strength greater; with less
or with more oxygen in the air, no doubt our lungs
would have been different. With less light no doubt
our eyes would have been larger, and with more light
they would probably have been smaller. We do not
feel the pressure of the atmosphere, but make the
pressure more or less, and we are at once disturbed.
The deep-sea fishes fairly explode when brought to
the surface, and no doubt the surface fishes would
be crushed in the deep sea bottoms. Just as we ad-

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just our flying machines to the tenuity of the air,
and our oversea and undersea boats to the density
and weight of the water, so Nature adjusts her
organisms to their environment.

Man avails himself of all possible aids. His volun-
tary conquests of nature are many and are con-
stantly increasing, but his involuntary dependen-
cies upon her are many also. He did not launch him-
self into this world, and he did not give his body,
with all its wonderful organs and powers, the shape
it has, or elect to breathe or see or hear or breed or
eat or sleep. Something else determined all these
things for him. What is that something else? Our
fathers called it God; we call it Nature, because we
live in a scientific and not in a theological age. We
are pantheistic and not theistic. Our gods are every-
where, in everything created. Our minds are no
longer hampered by the idea of a maker and a thing
made, a ruler or a governor and a thing ruled or
governed. The unity of Nature and God is a concep-
tion fostered by science. We are compelled to adjust
our minds to the idea of a causeless universe, to
a universe without beginning and without ending,
without a maker or a designer.

Our conception of cause and effect, or beginning
and ending, applies only on the surface of the earth;
where currents and counter-currents, action and re-
action and interaction, are in perpetual see-saw;
where every body rests upon some other body, and

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every cause has its antecedent cause; where we can
live only by dealing with parts and fragments, and
by separating one thing from another. The astro-
nomic laws and conditions, or our conceptions of
them, are thrown into confusion the moment we try
to apply them in our practical mundane lives. In
vain we try to abolish friction and achieve perpetual
motion, but the heavenly bodies move without
friction, and move forever and ever. Motion is the
prime condition of the universe. It is the condition
or necessity we are under in this world, on the sur-
face of this planet, that sets us on the quest of final
causes and gives rise to our conceptions of the made
and the maker, the good and the bad, the end and
the beginning. We cannot say that we are watched
over by the gods — our personification of the uni-
versal mind that pervades nature — nor that we
are not watched over by them, because that were to
use the language of our surface existence. All we can
say is that we are a part of the cosmos, fragments of
the total scheme of things, and share its laws and
conditions, and that the more perfectly we adjust
the nature within us to the nature without us, the
better we fare. With the Infinite there is no time
and no space, only an everlasting here, an everlast-
ing now.

Yet how can puny man interpret the universe or
say aught of it in terms of his mundane experiences?

Q24,

HORIZON LINES

VI. OUR IMPARTIAL MOTHER

Tue laws and processes of Nature which to us are so
beneficent, and which seem made for our especial
benefit, were in full operation before life as we know
it had become established. In fact, the fatherhood
and motherhood of Nature are all thoughts of our
own, inventions of our necessities. The paternity of
gravitation and the maternity of frost and snow are
in no respect different. We are the chance children
— chance from our limited point of view — of an
impersonal, unhuman, universal mother. We may
say, humanly speaking, that Nature takes fore-
thought of her children, but not afterthought. She
provides that they shall actually appear in due time
in this universe of conflicting and struggling forces,
then Jets them shift for themselves. They are born
on the firing-line, in the field of perpetual war, and
none escape unscathed. Indeed, they are moulded
and adjusted and equipped by the very conditions
in which the peril of their destruction lies. Gravity
crushes them, and gravity gives them their powers.
Fire consumes them, and water drowns them, and
yet out of these things they came.

It is as if some god had planned the universe as a
vast plant for the production of the myriad forms of
life, each in its own place and season. In our little
corner of it at a given hour of the great geologic
clock one form appears, or many forms; at another

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hour other forms emerge, till man himself emerges
as the culmination of a long line of lowly forms,
many vestiges of which still cling to him. But the
world is no more for man than for the mice and ver-
min that pester him. It is for all.

The mystery back of all — what shall we say of
it? And the good and the evil that are so inextricably
blended with it — what of them?

VII. BAFFLING TRUTHS

THE grand movements of Nature, both in the heav-
ens and in the earth, are on such a scale of time and
distance that without the aid of science we could
get little or no hint of them. Immeasurably slow and
slight they are, according to our standards. The
stars are fixed points in the sky to our unaided
vision. Throughout the whole historic period they
have shown little or no change in their relative posi-
tions, though they are moving in varying directions
at the rate of many miles a second. Come back in a
thousand years and there is no change; in thirty or
forty thousand years, and changes of place might be
barely perceptible to an unaided eye. Not till hun-
dreds of thousands of years would Orion, or the
Big Dipper, have become noticeably distorted, and
probably not till millions of years would the heav-
ens present combinations of stars forming new con-
stellations. The Pole Star will after millions of years
probably drift far from its present position, and the
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Milky Way be found in another part of the heavens.
When viewed from the extreme points in space one
hundred and eighty millions of miles apart which the
earth’s orbit around the sun gives us,the fixed stars re-
main fixed, they show little or no parallax. To touch
but the skirts of the Infinite exhaust our powers.
The geological changes upon the surface of this
earth — mere mustard-seed in space that it is —
are on such a scale of time that only an unfaltering
scientific faith can take them in. The mountains
and the valleys seem eternal, but to the eye of the
geologist they are as flitting as the summer clouds.
Look upon a Catskill landscape with its long, flow-
ing mountain-lines curving over summits three or
four thousand feet high, and its deep, broad, cradle-
like valleys checkered with fertile farms and home-
steads, and try to think of it as all the work of the
slow and gentle rains and snows — geologic time
stroking them almost as gently as a mother caresses
her baby. Tried by human standards we live in a
stable universe; change stops with the hills and the
stars; but, tried by geologic and astronomic stand-
ards, it is as unsubstantial as the snows of winter or
the dews of summer. Perpetual flux and transition
mark even the stars in their courses. Astronomers
calculate the weight of the earth in terms of its own
tons, something like six sextillion tons, but in and of
itself it weighs nothing; its weight is the pull of
some other body, in itself pound balances pound; it
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“ ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

is only by detachment from it that bodies have
weight. As we approach the center, a pound would
be less and less; halfway down it would weigh eight
ounces only; at the center weight would disappear,
the pull of matter on all sides would be equal, there
would no longer be up or down. Gravitation is not a
demon at the center of the earth, pulling all things
toward him; it is a force in every atom, pulling and
being pulled in every direction. Seek the center of
the pulling, and all power vanishes.

The globe is on such a scale of size with reference
to our lives and powers that by no effort of the imag-
ination can we adjust ourselves to the contradic-
tions presented. It is not by experience, nor by living
and acting, that we know it as a sphere, but by
thinking and speculating. Even if we travel round
it, we get no other impression than that it is an end-
less plain. We find no under side; it is all top side.
The practical inferences we draw from looking at
the moon are all contradicted by our experiences
here. The lower limb of the moon is not lower, as we
should find if we were to go there, and the under
side of the earth is also the upper side.

Our astronomy is sound, but our actual life gives
us no clue to its truths. Only when we turn philoso-
phers do we know the tremendous voyage we are
making, and then we only know it abstractly. We
never can know it concretely. The swift turning of
the planet under our feet, and its enormous speed in

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its orbit around the sun, are not revealed to our
sense as motion, but as changes from night to day
and from one season to another. Slow, soft, still, the
moon and the sun rise and drift across the heavens,
and the impassive earth seems like a ship becalmed.
No hint at all of the more than rifle-bullet speed
through space. It is all too big for us. The celestial
machine is no machine at all to our senses, but its
vast movements go on as gently and as easily as the
falling of the dew or the blooming of the flowers,
and almost as unconsciously to us as the circulation
of the blood in our hearts.

We are in the heavens and are a part of the great
astronomical whirl and procession, and know it not.
It is symbolical of our lives generally. We do not
realize that we are a part of Nature till we begin to
think about it. Our lives proceed as if we were two
—man and Nature —two great antagonistic or
contrary facts, but the two are one; there is only
Nature. We can draw circle within circle, and circle
around circle, but we cannot circumscribe Nature.
That is the fact over all.

As struggling human beings we diverge from one
another, oppose one another, defeat one another.
All our differences and antagonisms arise from our
need of action and of living. The lesson of the sphere
is hard to learn, hard to state. Our powers of detach-
ment are hardly equal to it. Our lives are rounded
by the great astronomic curves. The contradictions

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which the intellect reveals, the unthinkable myster-
ies that surround us, the heavens over us, the earth
under us always—the relativity of all things —
thus does thought set us adrift on a shoreless sea.

VIII. SENSE CONTRADICTIONS

BERGSON says that we are in trouble the moment
we think of a creator and a thing created; in other
words, the moment we apply to the universe as a
whole the concepts which our practical lives yield
us. The only alternative I see is to think of the uni-
verse as uncreated, which, I confess, does not make
the problem much easier. I try to help myself out by
saying that our concepts are formed in a world
in which we deal with parts and fragments, lines
and angles on the surface of a sphere, and not with
the sphere as a whole. Our senses do not reveal
the earth to us as a globe, but as a boundless plain
with no under side; we find no limits, and if we con-
tinue our search long enough, we come back to the
place from which we set out, but from the opposite
direction.

When we try to think in terms of spheres and
solar systems, our everyday concepts avail us very
little; in fact, they set us down wrong-end up. We
look at the moon or the sun and we say, Surely if we
were at the South Pole of either of these bodies, we
should be as truly on the under side of it as the fly is
when it alights at the South Pole of the globe in our

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study. We should be in a position opposite to that
which we should occupy at the North Pole. That
every point on the surface of a cosmic sphere should
be on top, or rather that there should be no top, and
no bottom; that these concepts should be abolished;
that if two inhabited globes should come in collision,
each would seem to the people upon the other to
be falling down out of the heavens upon them; that
out in sidereal space not even the Huns could drop
bombs, or send up balloons, because there would be
no up and no down — when we grasp these facts, I
say, we are at the end of our tether; we not only do
not know “where we are at,” but we find there is no
“at.” Our minds can deal with the cosmos only in
an abstract or mathematical way. As a concrete
fact even our little earth 1s too much for us. Not
merely too big, it contradicts all our experience. If
we could build a sphere a mile through, or ten miles
or a hundred miles, or ten thousand miles through,
could we stand upon it at the South Pole? When we
think of the daily revolutions of the earth upon its
axis, we are compelled to think of it as turning over,
because it brings the sun above us by day and be-
neath us by night, and hence the puzzle to the un-
lettered mind as to why the lakes and ponds do not
all spill out.

Among the heavenly bodies other laws prevail;
there is motion without friction or dissipation of
energy; there is no body at rest; there is no motion

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in right lines, but only in curved lines; there is no
beginning nor ending; there is only eternal progres-
sion; and this is a condition of things that throws
our mental adjustments all out of gear. The prob-
lem of God, the problem of creation, the problem of
future life, throw our mental adjustments out of
gear in the same way. ;

There is order and harmony in our own solar sys-
tem and doubtless in countless others in the im-
mensity of space, but the cosmos as a whole does
not seem to present this harmony, as collisions actu-
ally occur. Astronomers tell us that the units of the
starry hosts are moving in all directions and that
collisions are inevitable, though at such vast inter-
vals, owing to the inconceivable spaces, that human
time can take no note of them. A billion of our years,
like a billion of our miles, count for but little in the
infinitudes of the universe.

When we try to think that the universe had a
creator, that there was a time when it did not exist,
that it was called into being by a power apart from
itself, do we not fall down completely? We can, of
course, think in arbitrary terms; our imaginations
are equal to almost any feat (Lewis Carroll’s was
equal to “Alice in Wonderland”; Dante’s was equal
to making the world shudder over his pictures of the
inferno): but the understanding has to have solid
ground to go upon, and where is the solid ground
in our idea of creation? We are off the sphere, alone

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in space, face to face with the Infinite, and we have
no language in which to express ourselves.

IX. MAN A PART OF NATURE

We habitually think or speak of ourselves as some-

thing apart from Nature, as belonging to some
higher order of reality, when, in fact, we are as much
a part of the total scheme of things as are the trees
and the beasts of the field. True, we are separated
from them by a gulf, but the gulf has been bridged,
_and bridged by Nature, and both sides are equally
her territory.

Nature is the one supreme reality, the sum total

of the visible and invisible bodies and forces that
surround us, out of which we came and of which we
form a part. Nature is all things to all men, because
she is the larger fact, and holds an infinite diversity
in an all-embracing unity.
_ When we come to look upon man in this light,
when we see his whole civilization and all his
achievements upon the earth —his science, his
philosophy, his art, his religion, yea, his follies and
crimes and superstitions, his wars and hatreds, as
well as his heroism and devotion — as parts of Na-
ture, as expressions of the same total cosmic energy
as are all things else, we have gained an astronomic
point of view; we see things in orbic completeness.

Nature is all-inclusive. We cannot draw a circle
around that circle. We have so long been wont to

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solve our riddles by invoking the supernatural that
the habit has become ingrained. We can only do as
Carlyle did, feed our minds with words and fall back
upon the natural-supernatural.

- Our attitudes toward Nature differ as widely as
do our occupations, our characters, and our tem-
peraments. There is the direct, practical attitude of
the farmer, the miner, the engineer, the sailor, the
sportsman, the traveler, and the explorer; there is
the gay and holiday attitude of the camper-out and
the picnicker; there is the sympathetic and appre-
ciative attitude of the nature-lover; there is the
imaginative and creative attitude of the artist and
the poet; there is the more or less rapt and mystical
attitude of the religious enthusiast; there is the in-
quisitive and experimental attitude of the man of
science; and there is the meditative and speculative
attitude of the philosopher. .

We almost invariably personify Nature and read
our own traits and limitations into her. We say she
is wise or she is foolish; she is cruel or she is kind;
she fails or she succeeds. The early philosophers
said that Nature abhorred a vacuum. Darwin says”
that she “‘tells us in the most emphatic manner that
she abhors perpetual self-fertilization.”’ There are
times when the most rigid man of science humanizes
Nature in this way. We look upon ourselves as tak-
ing liberties with her; we discipline her and train her
in the ways she should go for our good; we pit her

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forces against one another. Her flowers, her birds, her
sunsets, her rainbows, her waterfalls, her mountain
lakes, her ocean-shores, her midnight skies, at times
move us and lift us above ourselves. On the other
hand, there are times. when we frown upon her, or
despitefully use her and call her hard names. When
her storms or her frosts or her blights or her droughts
or her insect hordes destroy our crops, or lay waste
our forests or sweep away our buildings or kill our cat-
tle or inundate our towns and villages, we instinc-
tively look upon her as our enemy, and, so far as we
are able, arm ourselves against her. Emerson speaks
of Nature as that “terrific or beneficent force.” It
is both. Indeed, we may use a stronger adjective
and say that at times it is a malevolent force.
We ascribe all our human qualities and traits to
Nature. Indeed, we can hardly speak of her without
personifying her. As we are a part of her, how can
we fail to see our own traits in her? At least, how
else can we interpret her except in terms of our own
being? Early man did this entirely. All the natural
forces and appearances took on his own image, and
were for or against him. When we seek to interpret
Nature we still do it in the terms of literature, of
poetry. We humanize her, which means, of course,
that we interpret ourselves. Nature reflects the
spirit we bring to her. She is gay, somber, beautiful,
winsome, repellent, wise or foolish, just in the de-
gree in which we ourselves are capable of these emo-
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tions or possess these qualities. She is terrifying be-
cause we have a capacity for terror. She is soothing
when we are in a mood to be soothed. She is sublime
only so far as we have the capacity to experience
this emotion.

It is our reactions to Nature that give rise to the
qualities we ascribe to her. The music of the eolian
harp is not in the wind; its origin is the reaction of
the harp to the wind, but it is not music until it
reaches the human ear. The colors of the landscape
_are not in the rocks and trees and waters, but in the
experiences of the eye when the vibrations of ether
which we call light are reflected back to it from
these objects.

We create the world in which we live. I love Na-
ture, but Nature does not love me. Love is an emo-
tion which rocks and clouds do not feel. Nature
loves me in my fellow beings. The breezes caress
me, the morning refreshes me, the rain on the roof
soothes me — that is, when I am in a mood to be
caressed and refreshed and soothed. The main mat-
ter is the part I play in these things. All is directed
to me and you because we are adjusted to all. No
more is the kite or the sail adjusted to the wind, the
water-wheel to the falling water, than are we ad-
justed to outward Nature. She is the primary and
everlasting fact; we, as living beings, are the sec-
ondary and temporary facts.

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xX. THE FITTEST TO SURVIVE

Tue survival of the fittest does not mean the sur-
vival of the best from the human point of view. The
lower orders of humanity are better fitted to survive
than the higher orders— hardier, more prolific, hav-
ing a fuller measure of life. The cultivated plants
— wheat, corn, rye, barley, oats — are less fitted to
survive than what we call weeds. The latter can
shift for themselves, but the former cannot.

We lament the decay of the native Anglo-Saxon
stock in this country, and the increase of the races
from southern Europe and from the Orient. They
stand our pitiless sunlight better than do the de-
scendants of our Puritan ancestors. From our point
of view this rule of natural selection will not result
in a superior race, but in an inferior; not in better
men, but in better animals. Character and intellect
win in those fields where character and intellect
tell, but where muscle and brawn and vitality tell
more they fail.

The Japanese have great power of survival; they
are hardy, prolific, and pushing: The Germans also
have great survival power, greater than the French;
they are more prolific, more materialistic, nearer
the brutes; they are not handicapped with much
soul. They are morally blind, but intellectually
clever. Their moral blindness and insensibility have
resulted in their downfall. Great Britain leads the

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European nations because she is not only hardy and
prolific, but she also has the gift of empire; she
builds upon law and order; she establishes justice
and fair play.

In the Darwinian sense the Jews are the fittest to
survive of all the races of man. They are prolific and
grasping; they will always get what belongs to
them, and a little more; they are bound to possess
the earth. The only drawback I see is that they do
not take kindly to the soil. Trade alone will not give
a nation the supremacy.

XI. THE POWER OF CHOICE

Tuinxk how we come into the world, what an impor-
tant thing it is to each of us and to the world, and
yet how fortuitous and haphazard it all is, and what
precautions are often taken to prevent our coming!
See the deformed, the half-witted, the low-
browed, the degenerate, that come. The great army
of the common, the few capable of higher and finer
things. Nature apparently finds her account in one
class the same as in the other, in Pat as well as in
Paul, in the inferior races as well as in the higher.
In our manufacturing affairs we aim to turn out
the best article possible — the best shoe, the best
hat, the best gun, the best book; but Nature makes
no such effort in the case of man, though she does in
the case of the lower orders. Probably every indi-
vidual bird or bug or four-footed beast in a state of
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nature is perfect of its kind, that is, suited to its
place in the scheme of organic life. But how dif-
ferent with man! It is the price he pays for his
freedom, his power of choice. The birds and the
beasts have no power of choice, they are entirely
in the hands of Nature. They are all moulded to
one pattern.

The advantage that comes to man from his power
of choice is greater variation, hence greater prog-
ress. He crosses or reverses or turns aside the laws
of Nature, or bends them to his will, and for this
privilege he pays the price of idiocy, deformity, and
the vast mass of commonplace humanity. His gain
is now and then men of exceptional ability, gen-
iuses, who lead the race forward. We know that
every improved breed of chicken or sheep or swine
will come true, but we do not know in anything like
the same degree of certainty that the Emersons and
the Lincolns and the Tennysons will repeat and
continue the type. Cultivated fruit relapses in the
seed, and cultivated persons often do the same.

On the other hand, rude and ordinary humanity
now and then far transcends itself in its offspring,
just as the new and choice apple or peach or plum
has its humble origin in a seedling.

XII. ILLUSIONS
In his “Conduct of Life’’ Emerson has an essay on
*Tllusions” in which he describes the semblance to
tne a

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

midnight skies paved with stars which the guide
produces in the Mammoth Cave by hiding himself
and throwing the rays of his torch athwart the ceil-
ing set thick with transparent rock crystals. The
effect is quite startling. For the moment it is hard to
resist the conviction that you are actually looking
upon the cloudless sky at night. But in reality is not
the noonday sky just as much of an illusion, except
that there are no mimic stars? The blue dome over-
head is an illusion. There is no dome there. The
sky is a mere apparition. It is not a body or a
reality as it seems to be; it is mere empty space,
though it has the effect upon us of a vast blue dome.
How genial and inviting it looks when we see it
peeping through the clouds, and how glorious when
we see it swept free from clouds! Its purity, its
serenity, its elevated character, move us to regard
it as the abode of superior beings. The telescope
dispels our illusions; the sky is not a transparent
realm, but only an extension of earthly conditions.
Heaven, the abode of the blest, takes its name from
this negation of vacancy. Our notions of a personal
God are similar illusions. God is as real as the sky
is, and no more so, even though in our devout
moods we lift our eyes heavenward and identify him
with this comforting illusion.

All our life illusions brood over us. The night
is only a shadow —the negation of light; and
yet it plays a part in our lives as real as that of

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health or friends or climate, as real, but of another
kind.

Time itself is an illusion. The future does not
exist nor the past; yet how are our lives influenced
by the memory of the one and our anticipations of
the other!

The world is, indeed, full of illusion. We fancy
that luminous bodies shoot out rays of light such as
we appear to see when we look at them. We see
beams and scintillations when we look at the stars
and the sun; but is it not all a trick of the eye? The
light from a luminous body goes out in all directions,
not in separated rays, but as vibrations in the ether.
When we throw a stone into a still pool of water a
wave motion is set up which spreads in concentric
circles. But the vibrations called “light,” considered
as a whole, assume the form of a sphere; they go
from the luminous body to every point of a hollow
sphere. We see a star as a bright point in the sky,
but if the universe were full of eyes, every eye could
see that star; its light goes to every point of the hol-
low sphere of Infinity. But no more than does the
light of the candle in your hand, or the lamp on
your table go to Infinity, if unobstructed. Stars
which cannot be seen by the most powerful tele-
scope must yet radiate their light into infinite space.
Is that light lost? Modern science seems to hold to
the view that in the ether of space no rays of light
can ever be lost. What becomes of them? It is cer-

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tain that a wavelet in a lake can be lost if the lake is
large enough. It soon dies out. It becomes dissi-
pated. Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be
scattered or turned into heat or light or electricity,
and the waves that break and die upon the beach, no
matter how cold they are, give up their energy as
heat. They must raise the temperature some frac-
tion of a degree.

XIII. IS NATURE SUICIDAL?

EMERSON never committed himself to a belief in im-
mortality as usually understood — continued exist-
ence in another world; but he was always on the
lookout for hints and suggestions to spur his lagging
faith on the subject. He read Martial and praised
his literary faculty. He is the true writer, he said, a
chemical and not a mechanical mixture: “Martial
suggests again, as every purely literary book does,
the immortality. We see we are wiser than we were:
we are older. Can Nature afford to lose such im-
provements? Is Nature a suicide?” The same ques-
tions I have heard Whitman ask, questions asked
probably by thoughtful men in all ages.

But are not such questions prompted by our own
petty economies? We must save what we have
gained. Not so Nature. Gain and loss with her are
one. All is hers. She has infinite time, and infinite
abundance. How can she afford so many dead worlds
and burnt-out suns scattered throughout sidereal

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space, like boulders in a New England field? How
can she afford to wait millions of years before life
comes to the superior planets, if it ever comes?
What economy is that which strews the way of evo-
lution with untold numbers of extinct species?
What economy is that which makes one species
prey upon another? — which undoes with one hand
what she achieves with the other? Nature was mil-
lions of years in bringing man out of the earth, —
the end and flower of her whole scheme from our
point of view,—and probably in far less time he
will have disappeared from the earth. How can
she afford it? “Is Nature suicidal?” She certainly
is, tried by our standards. Not that she is less than
we, but so inconceivably more. She plays the game
for her own amusement. She evaporates the rivers
and the seas, confident that the water will come back
again. She keeps the currents going; the ebb and
flow never cease. Night and day, life and death, go
hand in hand. Her “improvements” are improve-
ments for a day, an hour, a moment — like snow-
flakes on the river — “‘a moment white, then gone
forever.” They are crystals that perish, flowers that
fall. Nature knows no exhaustion; she can repeat
the process continuously. Only the unlimited is in-
exhaustible. The infinite goes on forever. Our eco-
nomics pale in the face of Nature’s prodigalities. A
race like the Greeks perishes, and Nature’s treasury
is still full. Every spring in our climate the marvel
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

of leaf and flower is repeated in the plants and for-
ests, and every fall the work is undone. The great,
the noble, the heroic, youth, age, manhood, woman-
hood, fail and disappear, and still the game goes on.
The rivers drain the hills and mountains, and still
they never run dry. Spring and summer do not ex:
haust the fertility of Nature. The rivers carry the
soil into the sea, but they do not carry it off
the globe. We cannot defertilize the earth. What
the seas lose, the clouds gain; what the clouds lose,
the earth gains; what the hills lose, the sea gains;
and so the circle is complete.

Nature has her own economies that answer to our
own. In the use of means to an end, as in the living
world, there must be economy of time, of space, of
power; there must be adjustments, compensations,
and so on. In the tropics vegetation takes its time.
No hurry; the heat does not fail. In the temperate
zone there is less time, and the pace of vegetation is
faster. In the frigid zone it is faster still, the time is
brief; there is no prodigality of leaf and stalk and
flower; hurry up is the cry. The stalk is short, the
flowering is brief, the goal is the seed which must be
matured. In our climate, if a plant gets a later start,
or is cut down and compelled to bloom again, —
for example, the burdock, — how it hastens, how it
pushes out its seed-vessels from the main stalk!
The late fall dandelions do not indulge in long
stalks; they bloom close to the ground and develop

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their down-seed balloons or parachutes at once.
In the Far North the willow and birch are mere
running vines, but they achieve fruit.

The economy of living nature is the basis of our
economy; we improve upon it, we take a short cut,
we save time and save power. We trim our trees, we
remove obstructions, we fertilize, we graft, we sow
and plant. Nature is prodigal of her spawn and
pollen to offset the element of chance that enters
into the action of the winds and the waves.

The wild creatures have their instinctive econo-
mies and ways of getting on in the world. They pre-
pare for the winter; they provide for their young;
they practice the arts of concealment; they are wise
for their own good; they do not commit suicide.
The plants have their economies, and the insects
have theirs, but when we talk of the economy of
Nature, we are beyond soundings. Nature cannot
spend more than she earns; her ledgers always bal-
ance; her capital cannot be impaired. There is no
waste, in our sense, in the universe. Can you de-
stroy magnetism by pulverizing the magnet? Would
electricity be quenched if no storm-cloud ever again
appeared in the sky?

XIV. THE PERSISTENCE OF ENERGY
Is it not reassuring to know that we cannot get out
of the universe — that whatever is real about us
cannot be destroyed, but can only suffer change?
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All the elements that enter into my body must per-
sist; they always have persisted through all the
vicissitudes of astronomic and geologic time. We
are as sure of that as we are sure of anything, and
we are sure that they will continue in some form to
exist. We believe it without proof. Our scientific
faith carries us over this gulf — our faith in the
oneness and integrity of the universe. Is there any-
thing real, in the same sense, in what we call our
minds or souls? Huxley was convinced that con-
sciousness was as real as matter and energy, and
must persist like them — persist in other persons
who follow us; but how about our individual selves?
And how about consciousness when the race of man
becomes extinct? We can only take refuge in the
thought that consciousness will dawn and continue
in other worlds through all time, or rather endless
time, since the all of a thing implies limits. Equally
to make consciousness coeval with matter and en-
ergy, we must think of it as having existed in other
worlds throughout an endless and beginningless
past. But my consciousness and your consciousness
are bound up with certain combinations of matter
which we know are unstable — in fact, are the re-
sult, in a sense, of their instability, their ceaseless
change. -

In the final change, which we call death, what
happens to consciousness? When we try to think of
it in terms of our actual experience with tangible

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bodies, we think of it as gone out, non-existent, as
truly so as is the flame of the candle when we blow
it out, or as is the star form of the snowflake when
it is melted. Does it help us any to think of the soul,
or consciousness, in terms of the imponderable bod-
ies — light, electricity, radio-activity? Do all these
wireless messages that go forth into the air, go on
forever? Do these impulses reach the farthest stars,
and still persist? Do our thoughts persist upon the
ether? Here, in this room, here in this air that you
may inclose with your two hands, are vibrating
wireless messages from far and near, though we are
not able to detect them. Here also the ether may be
tremulous with the thoughts of our friends on the
other side of the globe, yes, and with the thoughts of
our friends who have ceased to live, as we know life.
The ether of space may still be vibrating with the
thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, of Moses and Solo-
mon.

Do we impress ourselves momentarily upon the
ether around us, and is this what the mediums and
the clairvoyants recover? Is the persistence of our
thoughts upon the ether the secret of the mind-
reader’s art, and of all the marvelous things dis-
closed by psychic research? Is this the only immor-
tality, the immortality of the endless persistence
of vibrations from our brains? Or must we think
of our personalities as disembodied and drifting
about as separate entities in the great Nowhere?

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Though a dreamer and an idealist, I am only
truly interested in a natural explanation of things
— an explanation that is in harmony with our ex-
periences in this world. The so-called supernatural
explanation does not interest me at all. We cannot —
grasp it and bring it to the test of reason and experi-
ence. It is like a bridge with one or more spans miss-
ing — only faith can carry us over, and faith that
has nothing to stand upon cannot really carry us
over. It travels in a circle, and leaves us where it
found us.

Energy is certainly one of the realities of the cos-
mos, though we may not be able to form a concept
of it as we do of matter. We cannot visualize it. We
know it only through its effects upon tangible bod-
ies. Why may there not be a principle of life or vi-
tality as real as is energy — another form of energy
which we can know only through its effects upon
matter; inseparably bound up with matter as en-
ergy is; not with all matter, but with a limited
amount of matter, as is magnetism—a peculiar
form of force or energy, dependent for its mani-
festations upon well-defined conditions and reaching
its highest manifestations in the mind or conscious-
ness of man. Spirit, as we name it, is only a word
which stands for no verifiable reality — something
separable from matter and independent of it. What
victims we are of words! When we get a name for a
thing we are persuaded the thing exists. The vital

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process is inseparable from the physical processes;
it supplements or controls them, but is more than
they are. Life is not a spirit, but a form of energy
potential in matter, and developed and active when
the conditions are right. A living body is moved by
a new force just as truly as a piece of magnetized
steel is moved by a new force, or as truly as a
new force streams through the telegraph-wires—
a transformation of other forces, and behaving in a
new way, and producing new results. There is noth-
ing new under the sun; all are made of one stuff; but
there are endless transformations and permutations
of this one stuff, and one of them is the phenomenon
of life, or vitality.

Electricity is not matter, but it is the most un-
mistakable and ubiquitous form of energy known
to us. The human mind is a phenomenon of mat-
ter; how related to the electro-magnetic world we
know not, but undoubtedly in some way bound up
with it.

To discuss the soul or attempt to interpret it in
terms of these mundane forces will, of course, offend
the so-called spiritualists. So long have we been
taught to look upon the soul as belonging to an-
other world, another order of things from that of the
body. Whitman says that soul and body are one,
and leaves his puzzled reader to solve the riddle as
best he can. Heaven and earth are one in the same
sense — there is nothing alien or irreconcilable be-

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tween them. The flower and its stalk, the perfume
and the root, are one in the same sense. The mind
resides in the gray matter of the brain, and depends
upon the food we eat as truly as does the body.

When we discuss these questions in terms of our
religious training we reach far different conclusions,
or, rather, we start with far different conclusions;
but how can we relate these conclusions to the con-
crete facts as we know them?

There is enough that is verifiable in clairvoyance
and mind-reading and mental healing to convince
us that we are immersed in a world of subtle forces
that ordinarily we wot not of; that in some way a
process of give and take between us and these things
is constantly going on, and that our relation to
them is at least one form or suggestion of our 1m-
mortality. We are a part of the wave of energy that
sweeps through the cosmos, as truly as the drops
of the sea hold and convey the tidal impulse. We -
know, or think we know, the sources of this tidal
impulse, but the attraction between earth and moon
and sun is reciprocal—a give-and-take process
— and is only a phase of the sum total (if the In-
finite can be said to have a sum total) of the energy
of the cosmos.

The magnet and magnetism are one. If you melt
or pulverize the magnet, you dissipate, but do not
destroy the magnetism. The clouds come and go;
now we see them, and then there is only blue sky

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where they were. Change, but not destruction.
When the thunder-cloud disperses, where are its
terrible bolts? Withdrawn, probably, or redistrib-
uted into the inmost recesses of matter or of the
ether. The energy of the human brain and body
cannot be destroyed by death, only changed. If
consciousness Is a force, then it, too, must persist. It
seems, In some way, the equivalent of the force of
the body, at least one of its phenomena. But is it
anything more than the analogue of the light which
the electric spark emits, and which is light only to
the eye? Consciousness is such only to itself; it can-
not be seen or felt or known by other conscious-
nesses. What we know about the consciousnesses of
others, we know through our own.

In the presence of the death of our friends no
doubt this is a cheerless and depressing kind of
philosophy, but in the pursuit of truth, if we are -
sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm
and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness
will be measured by the extent to which we put all
these things behind us. Heroic self-denial finds a
field here as well as in the struggles of life. We da
not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter
how welcome they are. “All’s right with the world.”
The laws of life and death are as they should be. The
laws of matter and force are as they should be;
and if death ends my consciousness, still is death
good. I have had life on those terms, and some-

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where, somehow, the course of nature is justified. I
shall not be imprisoned in that grave where you are
to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Na-
ture, in the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the
hearts of those who love me, in all the living and
flowing currents of the world, though I may never
again in my entirety be embodied in a single human
being. My elements and my forces go back into the
original sources out of which they came, and these
sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine

cosmos.

XTV
SOUNDINGS

I. THE GREAT MYSTERY

O man in his senses can fail to grant the reality

of the Great Mystery, the inscrutable and un-
speakable Something which lies back of us and
works in and through us, the vast Cosmic Energy of
which we and all forms of life are manifestations,
and in which we live and move and have our being,
call it physical energy or psychic power, or what
you will.

We are not here by our wills; we do not have our
eyes and ears, and the other wonderful mechanisms
of our bodies, and all our varied instincts and ca-
pacities and aspirations of our own will and in-
vention. We have little or nothing to do with the
functioning of our various bodily organs, scarcely
more than we have to do with the color of our eyes,
our innate dispositions, and our mental aptitudes.
In something not of us, at least not subject to our
wills and wishes, is to be sought the explanation of
our appearance, and that of all other forms of life,
in this world. In other words, we are an integral part
of a system of things which transcends our powers
and baffles our understanding. After we have granted
all this, can we still feel the solid ground beneath

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our feet in accepting the explanation and interpre-
tation which any of the formal religious systems,
old or new, place upon it? I think not.

In the presence of the midnight skies, of the crea-
tive and destructive cosmic processes constantly
going on in the awful depths of the sidereal space,
of suns and systems coming in and going out like
blooming and fading flowers, in the presence of the
geological and biological histories of the globe, or of
the histories of the different nations and races of the
globe, does not most of our Christian mythology
seem utterly childish?

How strange that we should crave a creed or a be-
lief that goes outside of our experimental knowledge;
that is independent of it, not subject to its tests and
limitations; something afar off and irrational and
inexplicable, and beyond the reach of time and
change! Who is the philosopher who said that we
are guided by our common sense in everything but
our religious beliefs?

We can taste and see and touch and smell and eat
and drink and measure and accumulate and organ-
ize and assimilate scientific knowledge; it gives us a
place whereon to stand our Archimedean lever with
which we can move the world and the whole sidereal
system of worlds. But with our so-called theological
knowledge, and with much of our metaphysical
knowledge, it is like trying to move with a lever the
mountain upon which one stands.

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SOUNDINGS

Furthermore, grant that the religious sense of
mankind is real, one of the most real things in life,—
so real and valuable that the life, the literature, and
the art which have it not seem shallow and ephem-
eral, — a living sense of the Infinite Mystery in
which we are embosomed and our constant rela-
tion to it, — grant this, I say, and yet our creeds
and systems of salvation do not minister to it.
They are too legal; they know and explain too
much. With them the administration of the uni-
verse is as simple and judicial as a police court,
save that in human courts of justice there is no
deputed sin or atonement. This is a gratuitous,
manufactured mystery of the theologians, as are
the Trinity and the saving grace of rites and
ceremonies.

Science has real mysteries. Catalysis is one. How
or why the presence of one body should cause two
other bodies to unite chemically without parting
with an atom of their own substance — as in several
cases in industrial chemistry — is certainly a mys-
tery. On the strength of such and similar facts in
chemistry, shall we image or invent a whole category
of mysteries which are beyond the reach of verifica-
tion?

What mystery hovers about all chemical reac-
tions! What a miracle that two invisible gases, such
as oxygen and hydrogen, should, when chemically
united, produce a body so utterly unlike either as is

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‘ ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE ©

water! The turning of water into-wine is as nothing
in comparison, but even that feat we want to see
done if we are to believe it.

What a mystery shrouds the whole subject of
electricity and electro-magnetism! A sort of disem-
bodied force, working its will upon matter and yet
subject to none of the laws of matter. Spirit? — but
a spirit we can evoke at will, and make to do our
bidding, to run our errands, a spirit more friendly
than unfriendly. How prone the common mind is to
think that because a thing is mysterious it must be
true!

As I have already emphasized, as man is a part of
Nature, so are all his creeds and myths, his religions
and his philosophies, a part of Nature. What valid-
ity does that give them? What support is lent to our
creed by the fact that it has been slowly evolved out
_ of the religious experiences of the centuries? Our
sense of truth is also an evolution, and varies from
age to age. That a thing is a part of Nature does not
settle its value. Shadows are a part of Nature; puff-
balls, fungi, marsh-gas, disease-germs, and a thou-
sand other undesirable things are a part of Nature.

Although the various religious systems of man-
kind must have their natural history, I regard them
only as so many diverse attempts to clothe the
spirit against the cosmic chill of the vast, unhoused,
unsanctified, immeasurable out-of-doors of the uni-
verse. This they do in varying degrees, and will con-

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SOUNDINGS

tinue to do, some appealing to one type of mind, or
— shall we say? — one stage of development, some
to another. The philosopher looks on and smiles, or
pities, and is content.

II. THE NATURAL ORDER

EvEN great thinkers like Mr. Balfour recoil from
naturalism and cheerfully embrace supernaturalism.
Mr. Balfour finds the key to the fundamental prob-
lems of life in the miracle of the Incarnation. He in-
jects into the natural order a theological concept,
and the riddle of man’s life is solved. To the natu-
ralist such a conclusion is as impossible as to hope to
quench his thirst with the symbols, H.O.

We may say every man born of woman is an in-
carnation of the Infinite spirit, and the hyperbole
may stand, but to affirm that one particular man in
the historic period was an incarnation in an en-
tirely other and more significant sense, is to read
magic into matters of common sense. It is an imag-
inary solution. It is an appeal from the natural to
the non-natural. It is offering an artificial solution
to a natural problem. One might as well attribute a
failure of the crops to one of the political parties, or
an epidemic of disease to an historical document.
The doctrine of the Incarnation is as far outside the
realm of natural law as is magic, and to see in this
the master key to creation is like ascribing all the
sin and misery of the world to Adam’s transgression

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE
in the Garden of Eden. The childish plan of salva-

tion of our fathers is as good as any other so long as
it holds men up to higher standards of life and of
thought; but the day is fast passing when it can do
this; natural standards must in the end as surely
prevail in religion as in our daily lives.

The nature that we see about us is enough for all
forms of life except man; why should he flatter him-
self that his appearance and life demand something
extra, some miracle, something mysterious and in- ~
comprehensible? Why not invest the gods we have
and know with the extra power demanded, rather
than appeal to gods we know not? How the fire
warms us, how our food nourishes us, how we sprang
from a microscopic germ and grew to be the men we
are, are miracles enough. Every living thing is a
miracle as wonderful as the Immaculate Conception
or the Incarnation, but of a different order. If I
knew how the meat and bread which the poet eats is
turned into poetry, or how the pond-lily weaves its
satin and gold out of the muck and slime of the
creek-bottom, I should possess a secret that would
make me cease to wonder at the so-called “‘mira-
cles.” In the face of the marvels we hourly see about
us in living Nature, why should we look afar off and
invent marvels of a new order? Why should we in-
vent impossible problems, and then invent impossi-
ble explanations of them?

The nature gods we know; we live in daily and

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SOUNDINGS

hourly converse with them; we see and know that
we are dependent upon them every moment of our
lives. These gods — air, water, fire, earth — and
the greater gods whose eyes blink to us in the mid-
night skies, why not credit them with the gifts
that we ascribe to the imaginary gods of the super-
natural?

The more we search into the ways of Nature, the
more wonderful and potent we find them to be. It
may be that if we could penetrate to the true in-
wardness of matter, we should find the key to the
mystery of the soul and the master key to all our
problems. But we feel that we must look afar off, we
must have recourse to the strange and the miracu-
lous. How the impossible does attract us! Even the
fantastic may be made the basis of a religious cult.
In Florida, in a remote, secluded place we found a
religious sect, embracing men and women of culture
and refinement, who upheld the social and civic
virtues and cultivated the industrial arts, yet who
deemed it essential for their soul’s salvation to dis-
believe all our popular astronomy, and hold to the
_ idea that, instead of living on the outside of a globe,
we live inside of a hollow sphere, and that the sun,
moon, and stars are appendages of this sphere, and
not at all what we ordinarily take them to be. The
expounders of this faith are not at all disturbed by
such facts as a ship at sea dropping below the hori-
zon, or an eclipse of the moon showing the shadow

259

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE -;

of a round body falling upon it. Such appearances
only confirm their theory. These Florida fanatics
defy common sense and the exact demonstrations
of science. Our supernaturalists superinduce an-
other order above and around the order we call
“natural,” and in a theological concept, the In-
carnation, link the two together. That they are
linked at any other point is not claimed. In the age
of miracles they were linked at many points and on
many occasions. Any saint could link them together
at will, and reverse or hold up the processes of the
natural order and substitute those of the super-
natural.

Such events as miracles come very easy to the
mind imbued with the old theological concepts.
Why should not this omnipotent being who made
and rules the world and all that it holds, and who
has a scheme of his own to carry out with regard to
man, step in at any time and annul natural law or
link it up with the supernatural? Belief in the the-
ory of such a being cuts many knots, while it ties
others that defy all our wits.

Life is so great a mystery that we need not invent
others. We have the proof of life always, what proof
have we of the Incarnation? We know what de-
stroys life, what favors it, what conserves it, but we
do not know its origin. We know something about
the stars, and we know the constellations are only
imaginary groupings. The historical events upon

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SOUNDINGS

which our creeds are founded are of the same char-
acter. The Trinity is a constellation. The miracu-
lous birth of Christ is a constellation. The fixed stars
of man’s moral nature and religious aspirations are
alone real. All the mythologies built upon them are
as fanciful as Orion and the Big Dipper. All the
various religions of the world, with all their super-
natural features, are a part of the natural history of
man’s religious instincts. Man’s craving for the su-
pernatural is as natural as our discounting of the
present moment, and no more significant. The
natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and
we take refuge in an imaginary world above and be-
yond it. The understanding becomes sated, and we
long for something we cannot understand.

Ill. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Or late years I am often moved to say to myself:
“Why kick the old theology after it is dead?” — as
I have often been tempted to do. It is almost like
spurning the bodies of one’s father and mother. The
old creeds may be outworn, but they have fathered
and mothered us all. They have served and saved
untold generations of men. Christianity, mythical
and irrational as much of it is, has yet been the sal-
vation of the world for nineteen centuries. Of course
it has been a source of evil as well as of good, as all
religions are, but the good has greatly predomi-
nated. In fact, it is the bed-rock upon which our
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" ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

civilization is founded. It has saved men in this
world by inspiring them with the desire to be worthy
of a better and future world.

We are saved, I often say, not so much by the
truth of what we believe, as by the truth of our be-
lief, by its genuineness, its power over our imagina-
tions, its hold upon our character, its fostering of an
incentive to right conduct and noble deeds. Whether
it be Catholicism or Calvinism or Methodism or
Quakerism or Christian Science or the Japanese an-
cestor worship or Buddhism, if it holds us to higher
ideals and gives sobriety and sincerity to our lives,
that is its true function.

In fact, any religion is good which supplies a man
or a people with a workable theory of the universe.
In practical matters, in dealing with real facts and
forces, man is compelled to be logical or he comes
to grief — he must keep fire and powder apart.
But in his religion and speculations he is bound by
no such necessity; he is free to indulge the wildest
dreams. |

Man does not expect fire or flood or frost or wind
or rain to favor him. He does not put fluids in leaky
vessels, nor a leaky roof over his head, nor plant his
house on a foundation of sand. His carpenter’s level
does not lie, nor his plumb-line make a mistake. But
in his religion he may be as capricious and fantastic
as he pleases; he has a free hand; he may even flog
his gods if they displease him, and it is all the same.

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SOUNDINGS

His creed is a passport to an entirely different world.

The religious sect which I visited in Florida,
which held that we live upon the inside of a hollow
sphere, treated our astronomy with scorn, yet
seemed to live sober, sane lives, and to do honest
work. But if they carried out the theory of the hol-
low sphere in practice, in their navigation, in their
clocks and sun-dials, or in anything else, how
quickly they would come to grief!

Christianity is a workable hypothesis; it solves
the problem of life to vast numbers of persons; but
how irrational and puerile its philosophy, founded
upon the myth of the fall of Adam in the Garden of
Eden! Destroy this myth and you have cut off the
tap-root of Christianity. But do we not know, in the
light of evolution, that man’s course has been up-
ward and not downward, that his “fall”? was, in
fact, development into a higher state of being?

Thinking men must find some sort of a solution
_of the problems of the universe, and feeling men and
women must have some tangible, concrete thing
that in a measure satisfies their emotional natures.
The human heart cannot live on cold philosophical
abstractions. The ceremonies and observances and
rituals of the Church give one something he can
see and feel. For my own part I do not need this
sort of thing. Every day is a Sabbath day to me.
All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a
celestial abode. It has not entered into the mind of

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any man to see and feel the wonders and the mys-
teries and the heavenly character of this world.

All religions look away from the earth to some
fairer and better abode, quite oblivious of the fact
that heaven, wherever we find it, will be of our own
making. If we do not find it here, we shall not find
it anywhere. But the great mass of struggling, toil-
ing, human kind must be comforted and encouraged
by the prospect of emancipation from the grossness
and suffering of this world. Goethe acutely said to
let those who could not have literature or art or
science, have religion.

Think of the many sturdy, God-fearing, church-
going, simple folk one has known in his youth —
how impossible their creeds, but how worthy their
lives! It requires the heroic fiber to accept the creed
of Calvinism; it is a proposition that tries a man’s
mettle. The current generation is too frivolous and
empty to be impressed by it; not one in a thousand
is man enough to accept it. The movies suit them
better. But what granite stuff went to the making of
our Pilgrim fathers!

Cease all Christian effort, all organized Christian
charities, all Christian enterprises in the fields of
education, social betterment, sanitation, ameliora-
tion of the masses, and our civilization would suffer.
Then why rail at the old creeds, I say again. They
prepared the way for science, and for the religion of
nature. Carlyle said to Emerson on that memorable

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SOUNDINGS

day in 1833 when the two sat down in their walk
over the Scottish hills, ‘‘Christ died on the tree:
that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you
and me together.” The old creeds nursed heroic,
God-fearing and God-loving men. True, they some-
times disguised the wolf in sheep’s clothing also, but
that is the fault of human nature.

Let us be as faithful to our day and generation as
our fathers were to theirs. Wendell Phillips said
that to be as good as our fathers were, we must be
a good deal better. Shall we rail at our Puritan an-
cestors for the hardness of their creeds? Although
the Pauline plan of salvation seems childish to us,
it seemed the foundation of the universe for our
fathers. To clinch a nail you need something hard,
and the Calvinistic creed has clinched the resolution
of many a man.

IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK

It makes me more charitable toward my neighbor’s
creed, childish though I think it is, to remember
that it came out of his life, or out of the life around
him, as truly as did my own. We cannot separate
man, and all that revolves around him, from the
totality of things. There is no depravity or cruelty
or perversion in the world that is not fed by the life
of the world. The war that has depopulated and
devastated Europe is just as legitimate a part of
total Nature as were all the fruits of the ages of
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

peace and prosperity. Everything in the woods is a
part of the woods, and bears their stamp; every-
thing in the sea is a part of the sea. The tumor, the
ulcer, and the disease, are a part of our bodies, and
are fed by its vitality. In our practical lives we are
-compelled to separate a part from the whole, to ac-
cept this and reject that, but when we essay to com-
prehend the whole we must see that all are but
parts, and that our philosophy is lame if it does
not see that the so-called good and the so-called
bad are fruit of the same tree.

We are prone to separate ourselves from the rest
of Nature and to claim for ourselves much that we
deny to all other animals, such as the existence of

the soul, and its immortality. But we are all of one

stuff. Out of the earth has come a creature that has
changed the surface of the earth over vast areas;
that has changed the course of rivers, and the face
of continents; that has harnessed the forces of the
earth and turned them against themselves. How
the earth elements came to organize themselves into
this creature — here we can take no step!

V. A PERSONAL GOD

I once heard an Irish laborer refer solemnly, with

an upward lift of the head, to the man up above. He

did not refer to the man down below, but no doubt

might have done so had occasion required. If we

have one, we must have the other to keep the bal-
266

SOUNDINGS |

ance. The man up above must keep his skirts clean,
and to admit of this the man down below must be
the scapegoat.

How long has the belief in the reality of these two
manlike beings, the one all good, the other all evil,
ruled in the minds and hearts of men! The old He-
brew prophets were drunk with the idea of a man-
like Jehovah. A terrible man they made of him — a
cruel, despotic ruler, wreaking his vengeance on his
enemies, exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth, a lover of righteousness, but a vengeful,
jealous, angry God. And the man down below was
his fit counterpart, blocking and marring or defeat-
ing the plans of the man up above. These concep-
tions go with the infancy of the human reason.

So many phases of our religious belief are the re-
sult of imperfect knowledge and false conceptions
of the world in which we live! They come down to
us from an earlier time, when the earth was regarded
as the center of the universe, all other bodies re-
volving around it. Man lifted his eyes and his hands
to heaven in an appeal to the heavenly powers.

It seems as if the religious sense of the mass of
mankind was, by the operation of some psychologi-
cal law, forced to externize and visualize, yes, and
humanize, the object upon which its interest cen-
ters. Orthodox religion, while proclaiming that God
is a spirit, that He is everywhere, that He fills all
nature, that not a sparrow falls to the ground with-

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out his notice, and that heaven is not a place, but a
state of mind, yet makes its God a personal being,
endowed with our human attributes, with likes and
dislikes, sorely tried by our sins and weaknesses;
nearer us sometimes than at others, present every-
where, yet abiding in one particular place called
heaven — these and many other childish and con-
tradictory things.

That keen, clear-minded man, Cardinal Newman,
regarded God under the image of a maker, detached
absolutely like any human workman from the work
of his hand. He is the Eternal King, absolutely
distinct from the world as being its center, —
“Upholder, Governor, and Sovereign Lord.” “‘ He
created all things out of nothing, and preserves
them every moment, and could destroy them as
He made them.” “He is separated from them by
an abyss, and is incommunicable in all his attri-
butes.”’ This being is always described and in-
terpreted in terms of man, or of our own finite
human nature, reflecting in his outlines human
history, human political and social institutions,
and the aims and objects of concrete human
beings. He does not hesitate to relate this God
to “every movement which has convulsed and
refashioned the surface of the earth,” and hence
to make him responsible for the death and de-
struction and misery which have attended earth-
quakes and have set back the tide of human prog-

268

SOUNDINGS

ress. Of course every noxious insect, every noxious
plant and beast and death-dealing germ is from
Him also. ‘“‘Wars when just” are from Him also.
Who or what are they from when they are not just,
the great Cardinal does not say. Can both sides be
just? Into such absurdities does the conception of a
manlike God lead us.

The modern scientific mind, quite as imaginative
— if not more so — as the typical theological mind,
never gets mired in such contradictions or tangled
up in such childish anthropomorphism. Such con-
fusion arises out of the habit of mind which sees the
whole creation directed to man; his good is its one
object and aim, and when his good suffers, some-
thing has miscarried. The cruel and destructive
things in nature can only be accounted for on the
theory that some aboriginal calamity, like the fall
of man, had visited the world before God took
charge of things.

The naturalist sees this as the best possible world,
sees that Nature is not an indulgent stepmother,
but a strict disciplinarian; that the good and well-
being of all is her aim; that suffering and defeat
are relative; that God’s ways to man are not justi-
fied in a day or a week, or in this place or that, but
require ages and continents to come to their full
fruition. The good and the evil that will come out of
the terrible World War will not all be apparent this
year, or next, but only in the perspective of history

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

— in the sum total of human progress of the ages.
Such a view is a slap in the face of our egotism
which demands instant returns, and which makes
the individual supreme. |
With Nature, as I have so often said, our stand-
ards of good and evil apply to us alone, and they
change with the changing years. The naturalist
sees that pain and delay and defeat are the price
of development; that the world is imperfect, and
man is imperfect, because growth and develop-
ment are the law of nature; that there is always
a higher level, and always will be, which we realize
only when we look back. A perfect world, as we use
the term, would mean the end of all development.

VI. THE ETERNAL

How much is in a name! When we call the power
back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of
superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we
call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of
green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flow-
ers and sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tor-
nadoes and earthquakes, of jungles and wildernesses,
of disease and death, too, but these things make it
all the more real to us.

The word “God” has so long stood for the con--
ception of a being who sits apart from Nature, who
shapes and rules it as its maker and governor. It is
part of the conception of a dual or plural universe,

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SOUNDINGS

God and Nature. This offends my sense of the one-
ness of creation. It seems to me that there is no
other adequate solution of the total problem of life
and Nature than what is called “pantheism,” which
identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and
sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute
being. As Emerson truly says, pantheism does not
belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes the one
and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and
from which we can no more be estranged than we
can be estranged from gravitation.

The moment we seek to interpret the Eternal in
terms of our own psychology, we get into trouble.
We cannot measure the Infinite by the standards
of the finite. Our economies, our methods, our aims
are not those of Nature. God, in the sense in which
I use the term, does not plan and design and adapt
means to ends as does man. God is no more the
maker than He is the thing made. How natural for
us to think that the air was made for us to breathe,
the water for us to drink, the light for us to see, and
the earth for us to inhabit! But these things are
older than we are. I have seen a pumpkin growing
in the fence and fitting exactly into the niche amid
the rails, but was not the fence there before it was?

There is design in Nature, but not in the sense
that there is design in human affairs and contriv-
ances. There is no designer. There are living ma-
chines, but no machinist. Things grow. Evolution

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is a vital process. Man’s course is a right line, Na-
ture’s is a circle. Man aims to cut out the waste,
the pain, the failures. How does Nature trim her
trees or renew her forests or weed her gardens? Only
by a survival of the fittest or the luckiest. Every
branch that dies and decays and falls from the tree
does so at the risk of the health and well-being of
the whole tree. Often the decayed branch leaves a
hole that in time causes the death of the tree. See
how evenly the pine and spruce and hemlock and
oak forests get planted by Nature’s haphazard
method, but think of the time involved! But what
is time to the Eternal? Man cuts out the time and
gets his forest quickly. He trims his wood and
avoids the danger of delays and decaying wood. He
selects such plants for his garden as he desires, and
avoids the dangers of the struggle to survive. He
takes the side of the weak against the strong, but
Nature favors only the strong.

The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. The
weather goes its way irrespective of you and me.
Storm, tempest, frost, drought, sunshine, are no
respecters of persons. The seasons came and went
before man appeared, just as they do now. The
Eternal never takes sides as man takes sides, but
because it does not, should we lose faith? The
Eternal takes sides as the sun takes sides, and not
otherwise. The light shines for all. Providence is a
universal beneficence. The clouds go their way. The

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SOUNDINGS

beneficence is seen in the slow amelioration of mete-
oric conditions through countless zons, till the cloud
and the bow appeared, and with them conditions
favorable to life. The impartial rains are oblivious
to our human needs, but, as I so often say, they are
on the side of life. They are on the side of develop-
ment. They made the sublime drama of evolution
possible.

The weather favored us ons before we were born,
because it favored life. Therefore, when we say that
the Eternal is neither for us nor against us, we
mean in our special human sense. He is on the side
of the righteous only when the righteous live ac-
cording to the rule of Nature or rightness, or in
harmony with the eternal order. And he is against
the unrighteous when they transgress this order. In
vain do we pray for victory on the eve of battle,
except in so far as prayer puts courage into our
hearts. Victory is for him who marshals the physical
and moral forces the most skillfully. The victory is
from the Eternal whoever wins, because it is the
fruit of the order which It established, or, rather,
which It is.

As we cannot get away from Nature, we cannot
get away from the Eternal. He sticketh closer than
a brother, closer than the blood in our own hearts,
not always to bless and to cheer, often to hinder and
depress. Not all ease and joy is life; it is as often
struggle, tears, defeat.

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_ Not by placing God afar off in the heavens — a
supersensuous, supermundane, supernatural being
—do we make the problem easier. Not till we
bring Him down to earth and incarnate Him (the
old myth of Christ again), and identify Him with
everything without us and within —not till God be- —
comes man—do we see a light under the feet of
Fate; not till then do we see love and fatherhood
and brotherhood and sacrifice and humility and
beneficence and altruism in Nature. When we see
man as a part of Nature, we see him as a part of
God.

In humanity alone do we see the face of justice,
of mercy, of charity, of forgiveness, of reverence,
of renunciation — human virtues, they, too, come
out of the heart of Nature. If this is a hard gospel,
still it is tangible, real, livable. We cannot live other
than on familiar terms with Nature. In her we see -
the sources of our power, our help, our health. We
know the conditions of our well-being. We know
the price we have to pay for each blessing. Our
reason, our intelligence, we come by honestly and
inevitably. Their fountainhead is in Nature.

Amid the agony and turmoil of war we need not
lose faith. We know that Nature is still Nature.
If disease and pestilence and famine rage, we know
that there are weapons with which to fight them.
We know that order comes out of chaos, that life
comes out of death. We have neither to curse our

QA

SOUNDINGS

gods nor to praise them, neither to do penance nor
to offer burnt offerings, but only to take and use
wisely the gifts they bestow.

VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY

Wuat difficulties and contradictions we fall into
the moment we identify Nature with God, and
what equal or greater difficulties we fall into if we re-
fuse to identify Nature with God! True it is that in
the former case we bring God very near and make
him very real; we see and feel our direct and con-
tinuous dependence upon Him — indeed, that we
are a part of Him; that every breath we draw, and
every thought we think, and every pound of en-
ergy we put forth is in and through Him; and that
we can no more wander or escape from Him than
we can escape gravity or chemical affinity. There
are no skeptics or atheists in regard to Nature. It
alone exists and goes on forever. But here comes the
pinch! God as Nature is not only the author of the
good, He is the author of what we call evil also;
He is as many-sided as Nature is. The savage and
merciless aspects of Nature are of Him also; He
is in the jungles of Africa, as well as in the walks
of culture and refinement; in the destroying
tornado as well as in the gentle summer breeze;
in the overwhelming floods as well as in the
morning dews. He is as much the author of dis-
ease as He is of health; of war, pestilence, famine,
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

as He is of peace, plenty, and the progress of the
world. He is in the trenches and the slaughter of
the contending armies as truly as in the most
peaceful and pious family or social circle in the
world. The asphyxiating gases are his, and the
bursting bombs, no less than the breaking hearts
and the prayerful souls at home. The comets that
come like apparitions in the heavens, and then are
gone, and the stars that shine steadfastly, are all a
part of the same scheme. The dragons and monsters
that possessed the earth and the fruits thereof for
millions of years in geologic time were the work
of that divinity which shapes our ends to-day.

We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter
ourselves that we belong to another and higher
order; that we alone are of divine origin, and not
involved in the fate of the rest of Creation; but we
are fragments of the same granite that forms the
foundation of the earth. “I am stuccoed with birds
and quadrupeds all over,’ says Whitman. The
reptile was our ancestor; we were cradled in the
old seas; we are kin to the worm and the mollusk;
we derive from creeping, swimming, noisome
things, from the slime and mud of the old sea
bottoms, from the cosmic dust and the solar
radiations. Why should we put on superior airs
when not one atom of matter will turn aside for
us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save
us from destruction? The vast army of elemental

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SOUNDINGS

forces knows us not. We may divert them and bend
them to our will, but they heed us not; they de-
stroy us the moment we lose control.

Nature does not love us any more than she hates
us; she goes her way, indifferent.

The best we can say about it all is that Nature,
or the Natural Providence, is too big for us to
grasp; that in these seas we can find no soundings.
But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is
worth living, love always pays; Nature serves us
when we know how to use her; when we plant and
sow wisely God will send the increase. Friendly or
unfriendly, of God or of the Devil, the physical
forces have ministered to us. More things have
been for us than have been against us; more winds
have blown our barks into safe harbors than have
dashed us upon the rocks. There are more re-
freshing showers than devastating tornadoes; more
sunshine than forked lightning; more fertile land
upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader
belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. Thorns
and spines and nettles are the exception in vege-
tation; stings and venomous fangs are the excep-
tion in animal life. Hawks can catch the smaller
birds, yet there are vastly more small birds than
hawks. The weasel can catch the rabbit and the
squirrel and the rat, yet there are ten-fold, fifty-fold,
more of these rodents than there are weasels. The
: carnivorous beasts of the plains and of the jungle do
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“ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

not exterminate the herbivorous; there is more good
than evil everywhere; more peace than war; more
kindness than cruelty. The God of Nature goes his
way, but his way is our way; we have arisen out of
Nature; as it is, the chances of life have been in our
favor; the stream makes its own channel; the waters
find their way to the sea; they do not all stagnate on
the way. Some of the seed which the winds sow
falls upon barren places, but not the most of it.
Some men are born criminals or cripples or mal-
formed, but not the majority. The creatures preyed
upon always vastly outnumber the creatures that
prey upon them. And in truth, in the whole realm
of Nature more things wait upon man than war
upon him.

VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE

THE unnamable, the unthinkable, the omnipotent,
the omnipresent, we cannot discuss or define in
terms of our humanity. The moment we try to do
so we are involved in contradictions, just as we are
when we try to define the sphere in terms of the
plane. The sphere has no length, it has no breadth,
it has no thickness, in the sense that bodies upon
its surface have. It has no weight, and it has no be-
ginning and no end, and we may say that its motion
is eternal rest; yet rest implies motion, and motion
implies rest. ,

When we say that there is no God, we only mean

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SOUNDINGS

that there is no being that we can define or con-
ceive of in terms of man. Nothing in the finite can
help us in dealing with the infinite. The Infinite, the
Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, cannot be a being
without sharing the limitations of being, or without
being subject to the bounds of time and space. If
God is everywhere, He is nowhere; if He is all-
powerful, his power has no contrary, and hence
ceases to exist. One after another the human and
personal attributes we ascribe to Him disappear
when we try to conceive of Him in terms of the
infinite. The infinite is equivalent to negation. There
are no terms in which we can define the ether; it is ©
the negative of all things that have length and
breadth and thickness, or motion or rest or sub-
stance, or friction or cohesion, or place or power. An
infinite being is as much a contradiction of terms as
a square or plane sphere would be. If God is a per-
son, with human-like attributes and emotions, —
though we call them divine, — it is legitimate to ask,
Where is He? where was He before the solar systems
took form? where will He be after they have again
become formless?

Our inevitable anthropomorphism prefigures the
Infinite as superman; He is man magnified to in-
finity. He is the supreme king or ruler of the uni-
verse. We dream of seeing Him face to face; He has
eyes, ears, hands, feet, and the emotions of love,
anger, pity, and the like. Man thus imposes his

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

own form upon the power that is and upholds the
cosmos. He carves it into his own image, and then
seeks to propitiate it and influence it as He Him-
self is propitiated and influenced. Praise is sweet to
it, honor is sweet, revenge is sweet, because these
things are sweet to man.

When we call this force Nature, we bring it near
to us and can see and feel our direct relation to it.
We are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. We
see its impersonal or unpersonal character. We get
light on the vexed problem of good and evil which
is such an insoluble enigma to the theologians.

Nature embraces all; she fathers and mothers all;
has no partialities, knows no exceptions, no miracles,
no deputied atonements, no evil apart from the
good and no good apart from the evil, no life with-
out death and no death without life.

IX. THE INSOLUBLE

Wuat desperate efforts mankind has made to shape
this vast, blind, unconscionable power we call Na-
ture into an image of a God that would satisfy our
moral and spiritual wants and aspirations! Where
did men get their standards of such a God? They
have evidently been slowly evolved through the
friction of man with man. They have possessed sur-
vival value. Love, truth, justice, mercy, have con-
tributed to the fullness of life and to length of days.
One may adopt Biblical language and say that
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SOUNDINGS

righteousness endureth forever. The triumph of the
wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season,
it may embrace whole periods of human history,
and entail measureless suffering on the human race,
but change and retribution surely come. The way
of man’s moral and material progress is like the
stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now dis-
rupted and noisy in rapids and falls, now sluggish
and almost stagnant in long level reaches, but
which does go forward and reach its goal at last.
But is there not some predetermined bent toward
righteousness, — not of the ecclesiastical sort, but
of the scientific sort, — toward the relations of
man with man, that results in the greatest good to
the greatest number,—a bent inherent in the
nature of things? Would evolution have taken
the road toward man and all the other forms of
life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started
at all had there not been some initial impulse,
or some thought, somewhere, of all that. was to
follow? :

The doctrine of design does not meet the prob-
lem; the doctrine of chance does not meet it. Design
in our human world means a designer. What, then,
does it mean in the non-human world? There can be
no design in such a world, because the human mind
is not present. There can be no chance, because a
chance jumbling and collision of the primordial
elements could not result in the organized matter

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

that is life, any more than a thousand of brick
dumped upon the ground can take the form of a
house. The brick and mortar demand an architect,
and organized matter demands an organizing prin-
ciple. Whence its source? There we are where no
further step can be taken. What about the divine
mind? But that is jumping the whole question. If
you place your God here, I shall ask him some em-
barrassing questions, such as, Where did you come
from? Where have you been all these eons? Why
are you so wasteful and dilatory in your methods?
Why have you made the world so full of misery?
Or, I might ask the question a little boy asked his
father : ““Why did God make Satan?” The prob-
lem, it seems to me, is quite as embarrassing to us
mortals with a God as without one. It is just as hard
to account for a God as to account for the initial im-
pulse. In both cases we have in our hands a rope
with only one end. In trying to find the other end,
we only get ourselves hopelessly tied up.

X. PAYING THE DEBT

In my youth I often heard the old people speak of
death as “paying the debt of Nature” — “He has
paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to Nature —
the earth, the air, the water — for the elements of
our bodies and the powers of our minds, and the
time inevitably comes when we must settle the ac-
count. That we are going to have something left
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SOUNDINGS

over — that we have only to pay the debt of the
body, and not of the mind — is one of the dreams
that it is hard for most persons to give up. Will not
then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim
its own also? Can you and I hope to remain de-
tached from it forever? Is that a consummation
devoutly to be wished?

Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be
lost. But processes may cease; the flame of the lamp
may go out, and the sum total of force and matter
remain the same. When a blade of grass dies, a proc-
ess has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on
in Ceesar’s brain and body. And when all life on the
earth and in our universe ceases, if it ever does, the
problem would remain just as puzzling, if we can
fancy ourselves still here to puzzleover it. We are
links in an endless cycle of change in which we
cannot separate the material from what we call the
spiritual.

The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed
as a dewdrop yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor
of the sunrise or sunset, or played a part in the bow
in the clouds. To-morrow it may be whirling in the
vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the life of
a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on
the window-pane. The movements of the brain
molecules in which the phenomena of thought and
consciousness are so mysteriously involved, they,
too, are links in the cycle of change.

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~ ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

« One of our younger poets, John Russell Mc-
Carthy, has had the courage to say:

“that we must look for life
Hereafter, not by one and one, — your soul
Alone among the souls of other men,
Drifting and staying, a thing apart forever —
But we must see when all at last is counted
And the great sum is made, how one by one
We have returned to Her, the Mother of All, —
The bit of soul-stuff that She loaned us.

For we must live at last a part of Her —
For we shall be forever as one with Her.”

The reverent old people to whom I just referred
paid the debt long ago, and the day of reckoning for
some of us cannot be far off. After the account is
closed who or what has profited by the transaction?
We are prone to put such questions to Nature, but
they are irrelevant. The universe is not run for —
profit, as we use the term. So far as we can see, itis —
run just to satisfy the esthetic and creative feeling —
of the Eternal. When the sidereal systems in space
run down, they are wound up again, and suns and
planets are started anew. The great game never ~
comes to an end; in fact, it is unthinkable that it —
should ever have begun, except as the flowers begin —
in spring, or as a man begins when he is born. Ante- —
cedents! Antecedents! — always. We cannot apply —

our standards of loss and gain to the dealings of —

the Eternal with us. “That I have positively ap-
peared,” says Whitman, “that is enough.” i
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SOUNDINGS

Each of us is an incarnation of the universal
mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and
every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps
and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an
end in itself. To ask what the great spectacle is for,
is to betray our tradesman habit of mind. Man is a
link in an endless chain of being. If we ask what he
is for, the old answer of the catechism is as good as
any — “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” In
other words, to make the most of his life and strive
for the highest happiness, which is knowledge and
appreciation of the universal. Coleridge says we
glorify God when we work for the well-being of
mankind.

How quite impossible it is for us to adjust our
minds to the thought of death — to the thought of
the absolute negation of life! When we torment our-
selves about death, about the coldness and darkness
of the grave, about being cut off from all the warm
and happy currents of life that flow about us, we are
unconsciously thinking of ourselves as still living, or
as conscious of the gloom and negation that await
us. Thus, when Huxley wrote to a friend (John
Morley) that the thought of extinction disturbed
him more and more as he neared the end of life, he
fell into this common fallacy, or contradiction. “It
flashes across me,” he writes, “‘at all sorts of times
with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall probably
know no more of what is going on than I did in

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

1800. I had sooner be in hell, a good deal —” as if he
expected to lie awake nights in his grave lamenting
his sad fate and saying to himself, “I had sooner be
in hell,’ where also he expected he would be con-
scious of his improved condition!

What possible difference could it make to him if
he did not know any more in 1900 than he did in
1800? Did he expect to enjoy his knowledge in 1900?
If not, why worry about it? What he was really la-
menting was that he did not know then and there
what he might know if he lived till 1900. He knew
that human knowledge was making tremendous
strides, and the thought that he should not share in
its advancement chilled him.

It is all very human, but very childish. We may
to-day dread some task or ordeal that we are to face
to-morrow, because to-morrow we expect to be
alive, but shall we shrink from the to-morrow of
death on the same grounds?

There is wisdom as well as wit in the epitaph in
dialogue which a clever Greek Byzantine composed
for Pyrrho: ;

**Art thou dead, Pyrrho?”

“TI do not know.”

If we put the same question to our own dead, if
they could answer, they would say, “We do not
know.” If they knew, would not that be proof that
they were not dead? May we not answer Huxley
that if consciousness is extinguished with life, he is

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SOUNDINGS

not going to lie awake nights in his grave worrying
about it? There is comfort in the thought that if
there is no immortality, we shall not know it.

Rereading that wise and delightful old French-
man, Montaigne, I find that more than three hun-
dred years ago he was of the same mind that I am
in this matter: “Why should we fear a thing whose
being lost cannot be lamented?” “To lament that
we shall not be alive a hundred years hence is the
same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hun-
dred years ago.”

An avaricious man might worry if he knew he
would have no more money on the next Christmas
than he had on the last, unless his physician had as-
sured him that he could not be alive on the next
Christmas. Then, if he worried, it would be on ac-
count of his heirs. But one’s heirs cannot inherit his
wisdom; it dies with him.

Death is such an extraordinary, such an un-
speakable event that we cannot think of ourselves
as non-existent. When you try to see yourself in
your own coffin, or standing beside your own grave,
it is still as a living man that you thus behold your-
self. It is, of course, as living men and women that
we are disturbed over thoughts of the grave. The fu-
ture is just as secure for us all as is the past. A mo-
ment between two eternities is life; a spark that
draws a brief line upon the darkness and is gone.
The spark has its antecedent condition in the wood

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‘ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

and coal and the processes of combustion from
which it sprang, and it has its subsequent conditions
in the invisible gases into which it has vanished, but
as a point of heat and light, it exists no more. Our
wise attitude toward death is, I think, to forget or
ignore it entirely. We shall not know it when it
overtakes us. “Avida nunquam desinere mortalitas.”
““Men must endure their going hence, even as
their coming hither — ripeness is all.”

XI. DEATH
Y

In death the elements of the body are not changed
— oxygen is still oxygen, carbon still carbon. What
has happened, then? Can it be explained by saying
that a process has been reversed? Does it bear any
true analogy to the redistribution of type after the
printer has set it up and printed his book? The type
is the same, but the relation of all the units has been
changed. The printer has arranged them so that
collectively they expressed to him certain meanings
or ideas. These ideas did not exist in the type, but in
the order of its arrangement. In one order or com-
bination the letters meant one thing; in another
order or combination they expressed quite another.
The same type will spell dog or God. When redis-
tributed and returned to the different fonts, the let-
ters express nothing but themselves. If this is a true
analogy, then, in the case of the living book, man,
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SOUNDINGS

what stands for the compositor and printer? We can
only call the compositor the organizing impulse; but
whence this impulse, and whose idea is it trying to
express? The redistribution of the elements of the
body is done through the activity of other forms of
life — the micro-organisms — those minute forms
reduce the body to its original elements. As we thus
have life at the end of the life of an organism, do we
also have life at the beginning of the organism? An-
cestral life certainly, or the primordial germ; but is
there a living principle back of and before all? Does
the logic of the situation force us to the belief in an
original Creator? The human mind is so constituted
that in some form or under definite concepts, we
have to postulate a first or primal Cause; we have to
think of a beginning; but is there any beginning to
a circle, or any center to the surface of a sphere?
There may be no beginning or no limit in time or
space to the cosmos. This is unthinkable to us in our
present state. Yet in making that statement I am
thinking of the unthinkable. We can deal only with
parts of Nature; as a whole it is beyond our power
to grasp. All bodies on the earth’s surface unsup-
ported fall; this is our universal experience. All
moving bodies come to a standstill unless power
from without is constantly supplied. Perpetual mo-
tion is impossible, but the earth and the other plan-
ets are unsupported, and their motion is perpetual.
Or we may say that they fall forever toward the sun
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

and never reach it, and that the sun falls forever
toward some other sun or system and never reaches
it. The laws of force and matter as we contend
with them in our experiences are inoperative in
sidereal space; there is motion without friction,
energy without waste, dissipation without exhaus-
tion. Neither upper nor under, neither falling nor
rising, neither end nor beginning. Cause and effect,
rest and motion, are one. The self-activity of the
universe quite transcends our experiences; the self-
maintenance of living bodies is far beyond our
reach; any end to the chain of causal sequence is
quite unthinkable to us. Our minds are made in
that way. They are fashioned in the school of cause
and effect.

Nothing can get out of the universe because there
is no out to the universe. Can that which has no
ending have a beginning? Can that which has no
circumference have a center? Can we think of any-
thing so hot that it could not be hotter? Or so small
that it could not be smaller? Or so big that it could
not be bigger? No, because our minds have been
schooled in this comparative method. Our sense
shows us a world of degrees. We can think of abso-
lute darkness, but not of absolute light. In the
Mammoth Cave you may realize absolute darkness;
but even on the sun itself would you experience ab-
solute light? We seem to be able to find an end to
the negative, but not to the positive. We can think

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SOUNDINGS

of a body as at absolute rest, but can we conceive of
it going so fast that it could not go faster?

Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in
matter, just as life is our consciousness of the oppo-
site change — one destructive, the other construc-
tive. The constituents of the body remain un-
changed, but a peculiar activity set up among the
particles, by what, we know not, is instituted in life
and ceases in death. An organism is made up of
organs, all working together, but each subordinated
to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may
cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet
the minute subdivisions, the cells, may be alive.
Certain ferments in the body may go on for some
time after the life of the man has gone out. And liv-
ing cells may go on multiplying endlessly without
producing an organized being. |

II

“Tr is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was
leaving his death-bed and hearing his voice for the
last time — “It is all right.”’ Of course it was all
right, and it will be all right when each and all of us
fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be.
Our being here is all right, is it not? ‘Friendly and
faithful,” says Whitman, “are the arms that have
helped me,” and friendly and faithful must be the
arms that bear us away. If it was good to come, it
will be good to go — good in the large, cosmic sense,
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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

good in that it isin keeping with the spirit of the All.
Not the good of our brief personal successes and
triumphs, but good as evolution is good, as the proc-
esses of growth and decay are good. If life is good,
death must be equally good, as each waits upon the
other. From what point of view can we say that
death is not all right? Certainly not from the point
of view of this universe. Archimedes could have
moved the world had he had some other world upon
which to place his lever, and we must have some
other universe to plant our feet upon to condemn
death. |

As I have already said, we look upon death as
an evil because we look upon it from the happy
fields of life, and see ourselves as alive in our
graves and lamenting that we are shut off from all »
the light and love and movement of the world.
Does our prenatal state seem an evil?

Did anything begin de novo, when we came into
being? Not the elements of our bodies surely; they
were as old as the cosmos; not the germ of our minds
and souls; they were as old as the human race and
older — old as the first dawn of life. Is it the J that
is new? — that which makes you you and me me?
And that is probably nothing more than a new dis-
tribution and arrangement of the physical and psy-
chical elements and forces of which and by which
we are made. The pattern of our personality is new;
each of us differs somewhat from all the myriads of

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SOUNDINGS

human beings who have lived upon the earth; but
is form, pattern, personality, separable from the
material that composes it?

It may be cheerfully admitted that when we look
at the question in this light, we are whistling to
keep our courage up. What of it? The band plays to
keep the courage of the soldiers up when they go
into battle, and what are we but soldiers fighting
the good fight of truth against error, of courage
against fear, of the heroic against the pusillanimous?
The whole is greater than any of its parts. Nature is
more than man. We must learn to efface ourselves.
The soul knows no rewards or punishments. If it
be heroic to sacrifice life in this world, it may be
equally heroic to sacrifice life in any other world, so
that we prove ourselves worthy of the gods.

XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH

Tru iy things are not what they seem. When we
put heaven and earth far apart, we think as chil-
dren. Heaven and earth are pretty close together.
The shortest arm can reach from one to the other.
When we go to heaven we shall not have far to
travel, and I dare say the other place is quite as
near, and, if reports be true, the road is broader and
easier to travel. What children we are in such mat-_
ters! The wisest men have the language of ignorance
and superstition imposed upon them. How difficult
it is not to think of the heavens up there as a reality,
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something above us and superior to us, a finer
world, nearer God, lighted by the stars, the abode
of spirits, the source of all good, our final celestial
home. Did not Elijah ascend into heaven? Did not
Paul have heavenly visions? Have not the saints.
in all ages turned their faces and lifted imploring
hands to heaven? How these things have burnt
themselves into our minds! We cannot escape
them.

In our floods of religious emotion we instinc-
tively look away from the earth. The mystery, the
immensity, the purity of the heavens above us make
us turn our faces thitherward, and as naturally
make us turn downward when we consider the
source of evil. The poor old earth which has moth-
ered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect.
Our awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds
we know not of. Our senses sell us out. The mud on
our shoes disenchants us. It is only Whitman with
his cosmic consciousness that can closely relate the
heavens and the earth:

“ Underneath the divine soil,
Overhead the sun.”

To most of us the morning stars that once sang
together are of another stuff. The music of the
spheres must be vastly different from the roar and
grind of our old rusty and outworn planet. So we
turn to the heavens, the abode of purity and light.
So do we discount and black-list the earth where we

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have to pay in struggle and pain the price of our
development. Think you we should not have to pay
the same price in any other world worth living in?

Emerson in his Journal quotes his brother Charles
as saying long ago that “‘the nap was worn off the
earth’”’; it was become threadbare, like an outworn
garment. Probably it seems so to each of us as time
goes on. In places in Europe the nap must be very
short at this time. But the nap will come again, even
on those shell-swept regions, after Nature has had
her way. Nature grows old in geologic or in cosmic
time; the mountains decay, the waters recede; but
in man’s time the earth is endowed with perennial
youth.

Science strips us of our illusions and delusions; it
strips us of most of the garments in which the spirit
of man has sought in all ages to clothe itself against
the chill of an impersonal universe; it takes down
the protecting roof of the heavens above us and
shows us an unspeakable void strewn with suns and
worlds beyond numbers to compute, but nowhere
any signs of the blessed abode to which our religious
aspirations have pointed.

It is interesting, in this connection, to note the
attitude of the old writers, such as Cornaro, the
Italian, toward the heavens. They evidently look
upon the heavens as outside of Nature. In speculat-
ing as to why it is that some persons have so little
vitality, Cornaro reckons the influence of the heav-

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ens may be one cause. He says he never could per-
suade himself to believe that Nature, being the
mother of all, could be so ungenerous to any of her
children; hence it must be some hostile influence
from above. Similar notions seem to have been held
in Shakespeare’s time:

“Tt is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and make could not beget
Such different issues.”

XII. THINKING AND ACTING

Ir is true we do not, as a rule, act without thinking,

or without some sort of psychic process, but think-
ing and acting are radically different. Or, we may
say that the practical reason is alone concerned in
action, and the abstract intellect in general reason-

ing. When we come to act, we know that we are free
to choose between two or more objects or courses;
when we think or reason abstractly, we know the
will is not free. Every act has its antecedent cause.

But we are practically free because we feel no re-
straint or compulsion. We feel responsible for our,
acts. We do not blame our red-haired father, or our
grandfather of Irish blood, for our hasty temper; we
feel that this is our very selves. What we call moral
responsibility rests upon this sense of freedom. We
are not aware of the fatality that binds us, any
more than we are of the weight of the atmosphere

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that presses upon us so tremendously. At the court
of absolute reason we see what puppets and autom-
ata we are, but at the court of practical justice we
see and feel that we are free to do right as we see the
right. The contradictions which Balfour sees, in his
chapter on “Naturalism and Ethics,” between the
results, of practical life and of abstract reasoning is
of a kind which one sees everywhere in the universe.
The circle is a perpetual contradiction. How can a
line go in all directions? — and in no direction? In
our practical lives there is an upper and an under,
an up and a down, but away from the earth, or con-
sidering the earth as a whole, there is no such thing.

Righteous indignation at the misconduct of oth-
ers, or self-condemnation, repentance, remorse, are
reasonable feelings because we actually feel them.
We have no choice in the matter. To whatever con-
clusion abstract reason leads us in regard to them,
it does not affect our practical conduct, because our
conduct is founded upon the sense of freedom. We
are here to act, to do, and not to reason abstractly.
This is the tree of the forbidden fruit. When we eat
of it we know things that may stand in the way of
our practical living. Balfour should see that we are
determinists or naturists when we reason, but free
agents when we act, and that there is no getting
away from the contradiction.

I may be the duplicate of my father, or of my
grandfather; every one of my traits may be inher-

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ited; but that does not prevent me from feeling that
they are my own; they are vital in me as they were
in him, and I feel responsible for my own acts
just as he did for his, though I could not act other-
wise. I could not, but I did not know it. I thought I
could act as I pleased.

The world which philosophy reveals to us is
vastly different from the world practical life reveals.
We are sure that light and sound are real entities,
but philosophy tells us that one is the sensation
which vibrations in the ether, set going by the sun,
make upon the optic nerve, and that sound is the
sensation which vibrations in the air make upon the
auditory nerve. When we know this we do not
change our action in reference to them — they are
still just as real to our senses as ever they were. The
moral law is not discredited or overthrown when we
discover through the abstract reason that fate, or
necessity, rules our lives. We made the moral law
and we try to live up to it. We do not always suc-
ceed. All trees aim at the vertical position; it is the
position which gravity imposes upon them; but ow-
ing to various accidents and conditions the trees are
not all plumb. How free they seem to grow at al-'
most any angle with the plane of the earth’s surface!
How they run out their branches horizontally in
defiance of the gravity that rules them and lift up
in their trunks and leaves tons of water and other
minerals against the pull of gravity! How free they

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SOUNDINGS

seem, how they bend to the wind that would over-
throw them, how various they are in form and habit
of growth, in the shape of their leaves, the kinds of
their fruits, the character of their roots! Yet science
shows us how the unalterable physical laws rule
them. They lean toward the light and the free air in
obedience to physical and chemical Jaws. And yet,
no doubt, if the trees were conscious of themselves,
as we are, every oak-tree would say, “I feel free to
be an oak,”’ and every pine-tree and beech and wil-
low and maple would feel a like freedom. The Irish-
man feels no compulsion or necessity in being an
Irishman, nor the Frenchman in being a French-
man. All life is held in the leash of physical and
chemical laws, and yet knows it not.

We feel that there is beauty in nature; when we
reflect, we know that the feeling for beauty is an
emotion of our own minds, and not a quality of out-
ward things. Scenes radically different awaken the
emotion in us, or may awaken it in one and not in
another (see Emerson’s ecstasy on a bare moor).
The world is what we make it, and duty is what we
make it, and the ugly is what we make it. Putrefac-
tion, repulsive to us, is to science a beautiful chemi-
cal process. Odors that are offensive to us are evi-
dently agreeable to the dog. Sounds which please us
seem to disturb him. The absolute is outside of life.
If the orbs of the heavens were conscious, they
would doubtless feel free to go where they do go; it

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would be their choice; it would pain them to do
otherwise. The comet rushes toward the sun with
joy; the music of the spheres is the expression of
their freedom and contentment. Can you help wink-
ing when the flashlight goes off, or when a missile
passes near your eyes? Our voluntary actions are
equally based upon physical laws.

Balfour, in his ‘‘Foundation of Belief,” talks
about the beauty of holiness, the beauty of sanctity,
but these things are beautiful only to a certain type
of mind. The time will come when they will not be
looked upon as beautiful or desirable. These con-
ceptions grew when men lived for another world,
when this world stood to them as the sum of evil.
Men then saw nothing holy or divine on earth ex-
cept the denying of earth. That state of mind has
largely passed. Holy men have had their day. We see
now that this world is a celestial body, and that all
our conceptions of heavenly abodes are untenable.
For my part the most lovable and admirable men
and women I have known had no savor of sanctity.
They were wise, kind, helpful, loving, living with
zest the life of every day, intent on making their
earthly lives square with what is generally accepted
as right conduct, and therefore comfortably indif-
ferent to what the theologians are so concerned
about — salvation after death, and the securing of
their “‘mansions in the skies.”’ Martyrdom bravely
faced excites our admiration, all heroic acts are
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SOUNDINGS

beautiful and admirable, and there are good natu-
ralistic reasons why this should be so. But our re-
ligious history has begotten a whole brood of ideas
that must gradually fade and go out, and our stand-
ards will more and more be those of this world.

Mr. Balfour would hardly deny that the organ
with which we do our thinking and reasoning and
form our deductions, the organ which is the seat of
our emotions of the beautiful and of religious as-
pirations, is a mass of gray and white matter, and
that all these things are the result of certain molec-
ular changes or movements in the fluids or solids of
the brain substance ; in other words, that there is a
physical and physiological basis to all our mental
and emotional life. Does this material side in any
way discredit these faculties and feelings? Does not
all that we call the spiritual adhere in the material?
Can we find that inner world, or any clue to it, by
dissecting the brain? Has it, therefore, any reality
except in our imagination? Prove that it exists
apart from or independent of the body, and there is
no more to be said.

But what I wanted most to say is that the reason
of things, or final explanation of things seems to take
the poetry and romance out of them. Reduce re-
ligion or esthetics or art to terms of psychology,
and they no longer appeal to the emotions or stimu-
late the imagination. Naturalism is true — reason
can reach no other conclusion — but the truths of

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naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious
nature. |

The heart is a big, strong, self-acting, muscular
pump, but when we lay our hand upon the heart
and refer our emotions, our love, our aspirations, to
it, we idealize it, we do not then think of its physical
function and character. By this act we are still de-
ferring to the ancient and outworn belief that in
this region resides the soul — the part of man that
loves and hates and hopes and fears.

The brain is the temple of the mind or the vesti-
bule of the spiritual world, but we can explain it
only in terms of anatomy, physiology, and physics
which darken and chill our sensibilities.

Things and movements come about through
’ natural processes, not through supernatural ones,
but when we state these processes in the only terms
in which they can be stated, the religious soul feels
hurt and orphaned. All our religious or theological
explanations of things discredit matter and the ma-
terial world, discredit Nature and all her processes.
Evolution is anti-religious; that man is of animal
origin is still a hard doctrine to the old-fashioned
theologian. Why is it not equally a hard doctrine to
him that we were ever babies or embryos, carried
about and associated with the viscera of our moth-
ers’ bodies? We have got to exalt the natural, the
material, and free our minds from the illusions of the

old theologies before we can see the truth and
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i

SOUNDINGS

beauty of naturalism. The sacred, the celestial, the
divine, the holy, all are terms that date from a pre-
scientific age, before man’s relation to the universe
was understood. They are significant only in refer-
ence to another world and another life of an entirely
different order.

The eternal, immutable moral law to which
Balfour refers, what is it? Who instituted it? Is it
other than the law of right and wrong which man-
kind is coming more and more clearly to see, and
more and more fully to value in the course of evolu-
tion? You may set the seal of some hypothetical,
supernatural power upon it, but what about super-
natural powers in a universe governed by natural
laws? The religious enthusiasm of the race, the
saints, the devotees, the so-called holy ones, have
doubtless had their value; they have helped lubri-
cate the grinding machinery of life; but their day
is at an end. We must invest our fund of love, our
veneration, our heroism, our martyrdom in this
world, and not look to the next.

That Nature is irrational, unhuman, no one can
deny, not because she is less, but because she is
more; she is above reason, above man. Our reason
calls Nature irrational because the reason is a special
faculty, and is limited; it takes in the arc, so to
speak, but not the full circle. Nature is irrational,
not because she is not suffused with mind, but be-
cause she does not count the cost, because our

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economies do not fit her especial scheme. Life is
synonymous with intelligence; all organic nature
shows the working of the primal mind — the adap-
tation of means to specific ends, and the steady
improvement from lower to higher.

What we think, when trying to render an ac-
count to the reason of the enigma of life, often has
little relation to what we do, as practical, struggling
beings. We are free to think in all directions, free to
move in but few. Our thoughts are like the vapors
that drift with the winds, or that expand equally in
all directions. Our actual lives are like the waters
that must flow in definite channels, and turn some
wheel or irrigate some tract of land, or quench some
creature’s thirst. That naturalism, with minds which
take an interest in it, should result in low standards
of life, or in any form of disorder or failure, I do not
believe. Only clear, strong, truth-loving spirits can
accept this explanation of things. Much more
mentality is demanded than is demanded by the old
conceptions. Hence one has to face the terrible re-
alities and discipline the spirit to accept them. In
the old views, in supernaturalism, all this is done
for one by the Church and one is a member of a
personally conducted party to heaven.

XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE
WE cannot find God by thinking. Thinking starts
us on an endless quest. We can find neither end nor
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beginning to the sequence of cause and effect. It is a
circle that ends and begins forever in itself. Men
find what they call God in action, in experience,
because in these practical dealings with the forces
of this world they are under the law of cause and
effect. They find beginnings and endings, they find
an upper and an under side, they find a lower and a
higher, a greater and a smaller: but in thought all
things are relative. Some wise man has said that if
there were no God, we should have to invent one —
invent one if we wish to explain the world in the
terms of human experience. Thinking turns the
world topsy-turvy.

Our religious natures are still Ptolemaic. The
heavens still revolve around us. We do not with
the eye of the flesh see ourselves in this world as on
a sphere — on a celestial body floating in space; we
see ourselves as on an endless plain over and under
which the heavenly bodies pass. It is only with the
eye of the mind that we see things in their true re-
lation and see that there is no up and no down, no
under and no over, apart from the earth, and no
God who rules as a ruler rules. We do not gain the
tremendous facts of astronomy through our every-
day experience; our search after scientific truth re-
veals them to us. Through this inquiry we see the
grand voyage we are making among the stars, and
see that the heavens are not a realm apart from us,
the abode of superior beings, but are our veritable

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habitat; that our earth is a celestial body among
myriads of others, and that when we solemnly lift
our eyes heavenward, we are lifting them to other
worlds made of the same stuff as our own. Our re-
ligious emotions and aspirations lead us to look
away from the earth and to imagine finer and fairer
realms, but disinterested science does not humor
our illusions; it brings us back to earth again,
back to the heaven we despise. Hence the trouble
the narrow religious nature has with science. It
experiences a cold shudder before its revelations
and will none of it. It will have beginnings and
endings, boundaries and limitations, heavenly and
earthly, and will read the impersonal laws of the
universe in terms of our personal human needs
and relations. It sets up a judge and ruler of cre-
ation modeled on our human plan, and then to
get out of the dilemma in which it finds itself, with
all the sin and misery and injustice of the world
which it finds upon its hands, and which omnipotent
love and mercy could never tolerate, dopes itself
with theological casuistry that seeks to justify the
ways of God to man. It is a world-old problem. The
only way I see out of it is by purging our minds of the
old dogmas and boldly facing the reality as science
shows it to us. Religion as the world has so long
used the term—that human mixture of fear,
reverence, superstition, and selfish desire — has
had its day. We may still marvel and love and ad-
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SOUNDINGS

mire and rejoice, but let us fear and plead and
tremble no more. There is nothing to be afraid of
worse than ourselves, and nothing to implore and
propitiate farther removed from us than the rain
and the sunshine. In the end all things work to-
gether for our good — not always for the good of
to-day, or of to-morrow, or for this man or that
man, but for the good of all, for the good which
evolution brings in its train. Evolution brings what
we call evil also, but evil is a term of our human ex-
perience, and the Infinite, the Eternal, knows it not.
What is evil to one creature in the struggle for life
we have seen to be good to another, and often
what our religious fears recoil from, science sees
as the beneficent operation of law. In Nature noth-
ing is unclean; her chemistry meets and appropri-
ates all, even when we flee or faint. Our physical
well-being forces upon us the conception of the
clean and the unclean, but in the processes of the
Nature that sustains us both are one.

We are adjustable creatures. We are neither
sugar nor salt, neither round nor square, neither
iron nor lead; we yield and we resist, we melt and
we freeze. We are as adjustable and as adaptive as
the leaves of the forest. The firmly woven texture of
the leaf, its mobile stem, the flexible branch to which
it clings, make it secure against the ordinary vicissi-
tudes to which it is subject.

Man is the most adaptive of all creatures; he is

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as local as the turtle, and as cosmopolitan as the
eagle. All climes, all conditions of wet and dry, of
plain and mountain, of sea and shore, of island
and continent, are his. His home is the world.
Lately he has conquered the air with forces of the
earth. Will he yet conquer the ether with forces
of the air? Already the ether conveys his messages,
but no mechanical contrivance of his can yet lay
hands upon it.

Let me again say that by the Natural Providence
I mean the general beneficence of Nature, the
blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating, inevitable
beneficence which brought us here and keeps us
here, and makes it good for us to be alive, despite
the vicissitudes and the occasional apparently lesser
phases of malevolence to which we are subject.
The changing seasons, the fertile soils, the rains,
the dews, the snows, the blue skies, the green earth,
the flowing streams, the gentle winds, in fact all
the conditions that make life possible and per-
manent, are expressions of this beneficence. The
whole movement of evolution, with all its dark and
forbidding phases, is an expression of it. Allow time
enough and the turbid stream flows itself clear, and
the stream of evolution is fast losing, has lost, most
of its terrible and repellent features. At its flood, in
earlier geologic times, one may say that its waters
were charged with the elements of huge, uncouth,
and terrible forms which have been mostly elimi-

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SOUNDINGS

nated; the current has cleared and purified as it
advanced; the dragons and monsters have nearly
disappeared; the reptiles have receded and left the
fowl and birds; the saurians are gone, and in their
stead we have the more comely and useful forms of
mammalian life. From our human point of view —
and we can have no other — creation has refined.
The tide of life is still like a river that has its noi-
some and unlovely margins, but how has it cleared
and sweetened since Permian and Jurassic times!
The scale of animal life has changed, less bone and
muscle and more nerve and brains, less emphasis
laid upon size and more upon wit. Only in the in-
sect world are the dragons and monsters, and the
carnival of blood and slaughter, repeated. In the
shade of a summer tree, or in a clover-field, one may
see minute creatures pursuing or devouring one
another which, if enough times magnified, would
rival any of the dragons of the prime.

XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK
I

PROBABLY that overwhelming calamity, the World
War, set more good people adrift upon the sea of
religious doubt and skepticism than all the ac-
cumulated evils of the past ten centuries. Men were
everywhere outspoken in their want of faith in the
Providence in which they had so long trusted. I
heard of an English clergyman who declared that
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if the Germans won in the war he would never open
his Bible again. Another English parson, with the
thought of the war weighing upon him, published a
volume of discourses which he called “The Justifi-
cation of God.” But judging from my own ex-
periences with the book, the lay mind will find the
grounds for justification as hard a riddle to read as
the original one.

Only a faith founded upon the rock of natural law
can weather such a storm as the world passed
through in the Great War, but unfortunately such
a faith is possible to comparatively few — the
faith that the universe is radically good and benefi-
cent, and that the evils of life grow upon the same
tree with the good, and that the fruits called evil
bear only a small proportion to those called good.
Persons who do not read the book of nature as a
whole, who do not try their faith by the records of
the rocks and the everlasting stars, who are obliv-
ious to the great law of evolution which has worked
out the salvation of man and of all living things,
through good and ill report, through delays and
sufferings and agonies incalculable, but the issues
of which have been unfailing, who do not see the
natural universal order working in the fiery ordeal
through which all nations during the historic pe-
riod have passed, who have not learned that the
calamities of men and of peoples are not the re-
sult of the wrath of some offended divinity, but the

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ups and downs in the long, hard road of human
development, and that, in the nature of things,
justice is meted out to all men — if not in a day,
then in a year, or in a thousand years; if not to the
individual, then to his family, or to his race —
those who take no account of all these things soon
Jose their reckoning in times like ours.

Every good deed, every noble thought, counts in
the counsels of the Eternal. Every bad deed, every
ignoble thought, counts also. But the stream tends
to purify itself; the world is thus made; evil is
real, but short-lived; the remedial forces of life and
nature burn it up or convert it into good. Our fer-
tile landscapes are the result of the wear and tear of
geologic ages; fire, flood, tornadoes, earthquakes,
volcanoes, have all had a share in shaping them.
Decay and death have fed the sources of life. Our
own history as a people and the history of the
European countries exhibit a like contrast and min-
gling of good and evil. We are too personal in our es-
timates, too limited in our perspectives; thoughts
of our own comforts and private aims are too much
with us. We must give Providence the advantage
of a wiser perspective.

The thoughtful mind, capable of viewing these
things on a bigger scale, does not need a world
calamity to reveal the unsatisfactory character of
the reigning gods. The daily course of events does
that. Infantile paralysis, for example, with its long

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train of the crippled, unoffending children, or a
man being slowly eaten up with cancer, or a mother
losing her life in trying to save her child from flood
and fire, and scores of other similar things, show what
a thin veneer our theology puts upon ugly facts.
Our ecclesiastical faith must be housed in churches
and kept warm by vestments. The moment we take
it out into the open and expose it to unroofed and
unwarmed universal nature, it is bound to suffer
from the cosmic chill. For my part, I do not have to
take my faith in out of the wet and the cold. It is an
open-air faith, an all-the-year-round faith; neither
killing frosts nor killing heats disturb it; not
tornadoes nor earthquakes nor wars nor pestilence
nor famine make me doubt for one moment that
the universe is sound and good. The forces which
brought us here and provided so lavishly for our
sustenance and enjoyment; that gave us our bod-
ies and our minds; that endowed us with such
powers; that surrounded us with such beauty and
sublimity; that brought us safely through the long
and hazardous journey of evolution; that gave us
the summer sun, the midnight skies, and the re-
volving seasons; that gave human love and fellow-
ship and codperation, childhood, motherhood, and
fatherhood, and the sense of justice and mercy, are
beneficent and permanent forces. They are directed
to me personally because they are directed to all
that live; they are the cause of the living, the
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essence and the sum of all life of the globe. I do not
mind if you call them terrestrial forces; the terres-
trial and the celestial are one. I do not mind if you
call them material forces; the material and the
spiritual are inseparable. I do not mind if you call
this view the infidelity (or atheism) of science;
science, too, is divine; all knowledge is knowledge of
God.

I have never taken shelter in any form of ec-
clesiasticism. I have never tried to clothe myself in
the delusive garments of a superstitious age. I have
never pinned my faith to a man-made God, however
venerable. I] have inured my mind to the open air
of the universe, to things as they are, to the dealings
of a Power that exacts an eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth; a power that deals on the square.
Those apparent outlaws of the heavens, the comets,
do not disturb the naturist; sidereal space strewn
with dead worlds and burnt-out suns do not dis-
turb him; the spectacle of the great planets rolling
through space void of life for untold millions of
years, does not disturb him; and if life should never
come to them, and should ultimately disappear from
the earth, he would not lose faith; he could behold
Europe drenched with the blood of a needless,
wicked war and not lose faith; he could see civili-
zation retarded and the unjust cause triumph, and
still know that the Creative Energy has our good at
heart and always will have it.

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II

Tur demand of our day is for a scientific religion —
an attitude of mind toward creation begotten by
knowledge, in which fear, personal hopes, individual
good, and the so-called “other world,” play little
part. Virtuous actions, upright conduct, heroic
character, the practice of the Golden Rule, are seen
to be their own reward, and the security of the
future is in well-doing and well-being in the present.
This is not religion in the old ecclesiastical sense,
but in the new scientific sense; a religion that moves
us to fight vice, crime, war, intemperance, for self-
preservation and in brotherly love, and not in obedi-
ence to theological dogma or the command of a God;
a religion that opens our eyes to the wonder and
beauty of the world, and that makes us at home in
this world. The old religion is a tree that has borne
its fruit. It is dying at the top; it is feeble at the
root. It no longer touches men’s lives as of old. The
great things that are done to-day are not done in
the name of religion, but in the name of science, of
humanity, of civilization. The brotherhood that has
force and meaning is no longer a sectarian brother-
hood; it is larger than all the churches combined.
The naturist must see all things in the light of his
experiences in this world. He experiences no mira-
cles; he sees the cosmic energy as no respecter of per-
sons; he sees the rains falling alike upon the just and
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SOUNDINGS

the unjust; he sees the vast, impartial, undiscriminat-
ing movements of Nature al] about him; he learns
that the land cannot sustain life without the fer-
tilizing rains, yet he beholds the clouds pouring out
their bounty into the sea just as freely as upon the
land; he beholds the inorganic crushing the organic
all about him, and yet he knows that the latter is
nothing without the former.

If God and the universal cosmic forces are one,
how surely is God on both sides in all struggles, all
causes, all wars, righteous and unrighteous! We be-
hold warring nations praying to the same God for
victory; we see this same God now apparently favor-
ing one side, now the other, and we are bewildered.
Our theology takes us beyond soundings. But the
naturist is not bewildered; he can read the riddle and
reconcile the contradictions. Napoleon (if it was
Napoleon) was right when he said that God was on
the side of the heaviest artillery — the more power,
the more God. |

This may be a hard, chilling gospel; it is like
going naked into the storm; but how can we deny
it? Can we refuse to face it? _ ,

XV

THE POET OF THE COSMOS

HE world has had but one poet of the cosmos,
and that was Whitman. His mind, his sym-
pathies, sweep through a wider orbit than those of
any other. I am bold enough to say frankly that I
look upon him as the greatest personality — not
the greatest intellect, but the most symbolical man,
the greatest incarnation of mind, heart, and soul,
fused and fired by the poetic spirit—that has ap-
peared in the world during the Christian era.
In his lines called “‘Kosmos”’ he describes himself:

**Who includes diversity, and is Nature,

Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexual-
ity of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the
equilibrium also,

Who has not look’d forth from the windows, the eyes, for noth-
ing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for
nothing,

Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most

_ majestic lover,

Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritual-
ism, and of the esthetic, or intellectual,

Who, having consider’d the body, finds all its organs and parts
good,

Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body, under-
stands by subtle analogies all other theories,

The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these
States;

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THE POET OF THE COSMOS

Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in
other globes with their suns and moons,

Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day
but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,

The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable toe
gether.”

Let me say at once that, whatever else “‘ Leaves
of Grass” may be, it is not poetry as the world uses
that term. It is an inspired utterance, but it does
not fall under any of the usual classifications of
poetry. Lovers of Whitman no more go to him for
poetry than they go to the ocean for the pretty shells
and pebbles on the beach. They go to him for con-
tact with his spirit; to be braced and refreshed by
his attitude toward life and the universe; for his
robust faith, his world-wide sympathies, for the
breadth of his outlook, and the wisdom of his utter-
ances.

Whitman is first and last a seer and a philosopher,
but his philosophy is incarnated in a man; it is fluid
and alive; it breathes and talks, and loves and
breeds; it nurses the sick and wounded soldiers in
the hospitals; it makes him the friend and brother
of all types of humanity, of the outcast woman not
less than of the man or woman of perfect blood:

“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,

Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to
rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle
for you.

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

‘*Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid
and liquid,

You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,

For none more than you are the present and the past,

For none more than you is immortality.”

My studies of nature and of the universe help me
to understand Whitman much more than does my
reading of literature itself.

Whitman is rapt and thrilled when he looks up
to the midnight sky. His very style is orbicular and
concentric. The scientific aspects of astronomy do
not engage him for a moment, any more than they
did the old Hebrew prophets; his science becomes
human emotion. He is the human soul matching
itself against the starry hosts, coping with them and
absorbing them:

“This day before dawn I ascended the hill and look’d at the
crowded heaven,

And I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall
we be filled and satisfied then ?

And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue
beyond.”

Is there not more than astronomy in these pas-
sages?
**T open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,

And all I can see multiplied as high as I can cypher edges but the
rim of the farther system.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

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THE POET OF THE COSMOS

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,

He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,

And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside
them.”

Again he says:

“Tt is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so
exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt, or
the untruth of a single second.”

He 1s filled with “the great thoughts of space and
eternity,” and common things assume new mean-
ings in his eyes:

**T lie abstracted and hear the meanings of things and the reason
of things.

They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.”

Who before Whitman ever drew his poetic, his
sesthetic, and ethical standards from the earth,
from the sexuality, from the impartiality of the
earth, or his laws for creations from the earth? Only
the wisest readers are prepared for their unliterary
flavor:

“‘T swear there can be no greatness or power that does not emu-
late those of the earth.

There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborates the
theory of the earth.

No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of

the earth.”

We all see in Whitman, as we see in Nature, what
we bring the means of seeing. Readers of him are
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‘ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

likely to see their own limitations for the limitations
of Whitman. It is as if we thought that the length of
our sounding-line was the measure of the ocean’s
depth. It may be so, but it is not always so. A man
of strict moral and ethical ideas, according to con-
ventional standards, will find Whitman rank with
original sin. Is not Nature rank with the same
form of evil? Whitman did not shrink from natural
tests. Naturalism was the essence of his religion.

\* Nothing out of place is good, nothing in its place is bad.”

But the good in Nature is vastly more than the
evil, else you and I would not be here, and the
good in Whitman is vastly more than the evil, or
he would have been forgotten long ago.

Evil, as we use the term, attends all great things.
Evil — some man’s evil — comes out of the sun-
shine, the rains, the protecting snows. One of our
poets objects to Whitman’s saying that evil is just
as perfect as good. Whitman does not say it is just
as desirable, but just as perfect. Are not these things
we call evil perfect — snakes, nettles, thorns, vol-
canoes, earthquakes? Is not a fungus as perfect as a
rose? — a toad as perfect as a bird? Each obeys its
own law. The germs of typhoid fever and of pneu-
monia are just as perfect as the germs that favor us.
Whitman said:

**I permit to speak at every hazard Nature without check, with
original energy.”

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THE POET OF THE COSMOS

The hazards are great, but the stakes are great
also. Readers who cannot stand an utterance of this
sort should goto Pollock’s “Course of Time,”’ or
Young’s “ Night Thoughts,” or Dr. Holland’s “ Bit-
ter Sweet.”

Whitman bares his mind and soul to us as he
bares his body. There are no masks or disguises.
His inmost heart is as nude as his anatomy. Nothing
is dressed up. No fashionable tailoring at all. There
is nowhere the air of the studied, the elaborated.
When other poets stand before the mirror, Whitman
looks off at the landscape, or goes and bathes and
admires himself. Or, to vary the image, when other
poets distill perfumes, Whitman aims to give us the
fresh breath of the unhoused air. In this respect he
stands alone among modern English-speaking poets.
He is the air of the hills and the shore, and not of a
flower garden, or of a June meadow, or of parlors.
That is what disappoints people. He aims at beauty
no more than a wood or a river or a lake or a jungle
does. His aim is to tally Nature.

It was my rare good fortune to know this quiet,
sympathetic, tolerant man for more than thirty
years, and to walk or saunter with him at all seasons
and hours. Often at night he would stop and gaze
long and silently at the stars, and then resume his
walk. He was an easy-going, lethargic man — noth-
ing strenuous about him, never in a hurry, never
disturbed or excited, always in good humor, cleanly,

321

‘ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

clad in gray, with a fresh, florid complexion, large,
broad, soft hands, blue-gray eyes, gray-haired and
gray-bearded. He was fond of children and old peo-
ple. What a contrast were his placid and easy-going
ways to the astronomic sweep and power of his
poems, his spirit darting its solar rays to the utmost
bounds of the universe. When I was with him I did
not feel his mighty intellect, I felt most his human-
ity, his primitive sympathy, the depth and inten-
sity of his new democratic character, perhaps also
that in him which led Thoreau to say that he sug-
gested something a little more than human.
Whitman’s attitude toward Nature stands out in
contrast to that of all other poets, ancient or mod-
ern. It was not that of the poet who draws his
themes from Nature, or makes much of the gentler
and fairer forms of wood and field, spring and sum-
mer, shore and mountain, as has been so largely the
custom of poets from Virgil down. Take all the Na-
ture lyrics and idyls out of English and American
poetry, and how have you impoverished it, how
many names would suffer! Nor does Whitman’s at-
titude in any degree conform to the worshipful atti-
tude of Wordsworth and so many other poets since
his time. He did not humanize Nature or read
himself into it; he did not adorn it as a divinity;
he did not see through it as through a veil to spirit-
ual realities beyond, as Emerson so often does;
he did not gather bouquets, nor distill the wild per-
322

THE POET OF THE COSMOS

fumes in his pages; he did not fill the lap of earth
with treasures not her own — all functions of true
poetry, we must admit, and associated with great
names. Yet he made more of Nature than any other
poet has done; he saw deeper meanings in her for
purposes of both art and life; but it was Nature as a
whole — not the parts, not the exceptional phases,
but the total scheme and unfolding of things.

He sings more in terms of personality, of democ-
‘racy, of nationalism, of sex, of immortality, of com-
radeship; more of the general, the continuous, the
world-wide; more of wholes and less of parts, more
of man and less of men. His religion takes no ac-
count of sects and creeds, but arises from the
contemplation of the soul, of the Eternal, of the uni-
verse. We do not get the solace and the companion-
ship with rural nature in Whitman that we get in
the modern nature poets. With them we admire the
*‘violet by a mossy stone,” or the pretty shell on the
seashore; with Whitman we saunter on the hills, or
inhale the salt air of the seashore, or our minds open
under the spread of the midnight skies — always
the large, the elemental, the processional, the mod-
ern. The scholarly, the elaborated, the polished, the
architectural, the Tennysonian perfume and tech-
nique, the Wordsworthian sweet rusticity and af-
filiation with fells and groves, the Emersonian mys-
ticism and charm of the wild and the sequestered,
were not for him or in him; nor the epic grandeur of

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Milton, the dramatic power of Shakespeare, nor,

usually, the lyric thrill of many of the minor poets.

You embark on an endless quest with Whitman;

not on a picnic, nor a “day off,” but a day-by-day

and a night-by-night journey through the universe:

“‘T tramp a perpetual journey,

My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from
the woods.

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner table, library, or exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the
public road,

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.”

He who can bring to Whitman’s rugged and flow-
ing lines anything like the sympathy and insight
that beget them, will know what I mean. Our mod-
ern nature poets are holiday flower-gatherers beside
this inspired astronomer, geologist, and biologist,
all in one, sauntering the streets, loitering on the
beach, roaming the mountains, or rapt and silent
under the midnight skies. When, now, in my old age,
I open his pages again and read the “Song of the
Open Road,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The
Song of the Broad-Axe,” ‘‘This Compost,” “ Walt
Whitman,” “Great are the Myths,” “Laws for
Creation,”’ and scores of others, I seem to be present

324

THE POET OF THE COSMOS
)

at the creation of worlds. I am in touch with primal
energies. I am borne along by a tide of life and power
that has no parallel elsewhere in literature. It is not
so much mind as it is personality, not so much art
as it is Nature, not so much poetry as it is the earth,
the sky. Oh, the large, free handling, the naked
grandeur, the elemental sympathy, the forthright-
ness, and the power! Not beauty alone, but mean-
ings, unities, profundities; not merely the bow in
the clouds, but the clouds also, and the sky, and the
orbs beyond the clouds. A personal, sympathetic,
interpretive attitude toward the whole of Nature,
claiming it all for body and mind, drawing out its
spiritual and esthetic values, forging his laws for
creation from it, trying his own work by its stand-
ards, and seeking to emulate its sanity, its impartial-
ity, and its charity.

Whitman wrote large the law of artistic produc-
tions which he sought to follow:

“*All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
compact truth of the world;

There shall be no subject too pronounced — all works shall illus-
trate the divine law of indirections.

What do you suppose creation is?

What do you suppose will satisfy the Soul, except to walk free,
and own no superior?

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways,
but that man or woman is as good as God?

And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?

And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?

And that you or any one must approach creations through such
laws?”

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ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE

Whitman’s standards are always those of Nature
and of life. Emerson hung his verses in the wind — a
good thing to get the chaff out of poetry or wheat.
Whitman brings his, and all art, to the test of the
natural, universal standards. He read his songs in
the open air to bring them to the test of real things;
he emulated the pride of the level he planted his
house by. Always is his eye on the orbs, and on the
earth as a whole:

**T feel the globe itself swift swimming through space.
I will confront the shows of day and night,
I will see if I am to be less real than they are.”

He would have his songs tally “earth’s soil, trees,

winds, waves.”

“Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?”

he demands of those who would create the art of
America.

His poems abound in natural images and objects,
but there is rarely a trace of the method and spirit
of the so-called nature poets, some of whom bedeck
Nature with jewelry and finery till we do not know
her.

In one of his nature jottings, written in 1878 at
his country retreat not far from Camden, New Jer-
sey, he speaks thus of the emotional aspects and in-
fluences of Nature:

I too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from

all the prevailing intellections, literature, and poems) to
turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfac-

326

THE POET OF THE COSMOS

tion, death. Yet how clear it is to me that those are not
the born results, influences of Nature at all, but of our
own distorted, sick, or silly souls. Here amid this wide,
free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigor-
ous and sweet!

I do not wonder that Whitman gave such a shock
to the reading public sixty years ago. This return,
in a sense, to aboriginal Nature, this sudden plunge
into the great ocean of primal energies, this discard-
ing of all ornamentation and studied external ef-
fects of polish and elaboration, gave the readers of
poetry a chill from which they are not yet wholly
recovered. The fireside, the library corner, the seat
in the garden, the nook in the woods: each and all
have their charm and their healing power, but do
not look for them in Walt Whitman. Rather expect
the mountain-tops, the surf-drenched beach, and
the open prairies. A poet of the cosmos, fortified and
emboldened by the tremendous discoveries and de-
ductions of modern science, he takes the whole of
Nature for his province and dominates it, is at home
with it, affiliates with it through his towering per-
sonality and almost superhuman breadth of sym-
pathy.

The egotism of Whitman was like the force of
gravity, like the poise of the earth, the centrality of
the orbs. Nothing could disturb it, no burden was
too great for it to bear. He seemed always to have in
mind the self-control and the znsouciance of Nature.

327

ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE !

He would fain try himself by the self-balanced orbs.
His imagination was fired by the undemonstrative
earth; he would be as regardless of observation as it
was. He was moved by the unsophisticated fresh-
ness of Nature. He saw that the elemental laws
never apologized; he would emulate the level he
planted his house by:

“‘these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they are.”

He will not be outfaced by irrational things:

*‘T will see if I have no meanings, while the houses and ships have
meanings,

I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for themselves,
and I not to be enough for myself.

I match my spirit against yours, you orbs, growths, mountains,
brutes,

Copious as you are, I absorb you all in myself, and become the
master myself.”

It is these cosmic and natural-universal standards
to which Whitman appeals, that mark him off from
all other poets or bards who have yet appeared, and
which, I hope, justify me in singling him out and
giving him a place in this volume.

THE END

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